Home

php architect: May 2009

1. The FastCGI extension for Windows and Windows Server 2003 can be downloaded from the official IIS site see Related URLs When you run the FastCGI FIGURE 1 Windows Features Turn Windows features on or off To turn a feature on select its check box To turn a feature off clear its check box A filled box means that only part of the feature i is turned on a j World Wide Web Services El I j Application Development Features NET Extensibility FI ASP 146 ASP NET wis FIGURE 2 Add Role Services x Select Role Services pupa Select the role services to install for Web Server ITS Role services El B Web Server Installed B Common HTTP Features Installed El Ei Application Development ASP NET L Extensibility ASP IT x Previous Install Cancel Descriptiga GGI defines how a Web server passes information to an extemal prog Typical uses might include using a Web form te asd culis a a standard CGT ecrit arty n ie peces The Gowngide ta using CG ig the Performance overhead 30 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows installer it copies files for the FastCGI extension and then registers and enables the FastCGI Web
2. Apart from the stored procedure example each of the queries we ve executed have been simple SELECT que ries In many applications you need to allow the user to modify the contents of the database This is gener ally achieved by using INSERT UPDATE and DELETE que ries or stored procedures that execute such queries The SQL Server Driver for PHP does not parse the query string supplied and has no knowledge of whether the query is a SELECT query that returns rows or an INSERT UPDATE or DELETE query that is expected to modify the contents of the database It merely passes the query string and any parameter information to the database and retrieves the reported results Most developers use optimistic concurrency checks for UPDATE and DELETE queries to make sure the at tempt to update the desired row only succeeds if the contents of the row have not been changed If the contents of the desired row have been changed the UPDATE or DELETE query will not modify any rows Neither the SQL Server database engine nor the SQL 1 sql CREATE PROCEDURE MySum 2 input1 int Qinput2 int output int OUTPUT 3 AS 4 SET Qoutput Qinputl Qinput2 5 stmt sqlsrv_query conn sql 6 7 8 6501 7 2 9 input 34 10 output 0 Sets the PHP type for the output parameter 11 params array array inputl SQLSRV PARAM IN 129 array input2 SQLSRV P
3. 0 o o 9 0 The SQL Server Driver for PHP supports executing que ries within transactions Let s say that in the previous example we want to make sure that the changes made by the UPDATE query are committed only if the query affected one row To begin a transaction call the sqlsrv begin transaction function Then simply ex ecute your queries All work done on the connection will be handled within the transaction You can later decide to commit the work by calling sqlsrv commit or roll back the work by calling sqlsrv rollback Listing 6 demonstrates this approach Once you ve called sqlsrv commit or sqlsrv rollback there is no longer an active transaction on the connection and changes made on the connection will once again auto commit Avoid long running transactions by either committing or rolling back the transaction as quickly as possible If a connection has an active transaction at the time it is closed either directly or through garbage collection the transaction will be rolled back If connection pool ing is enabled the transaction will not be rolled back until the connection is re used or is physically closed Retrieving New Auto Increment Values When inserting data many developers let the database generate new primary key values using auto increment columns After executing an INSERT query that gener ates a new primary key value us
4. 6 o o Are you avoiding inline JavaScript and CSS Are you serving just one JS and one CSS file Moving your inline JavaScript and CSS into exter nal files allows the browser to cache the content Consolidating them all into one JS and one CSS file also reduces the number of requests needed to load the page This is the best practice way of doing things but in the real world it is not always the optimal way especially if many of your pages have JS or CSS that is solely used on one page of your web site Placing JS and CSS inline can often yield a faster page load if adding a few bytes of un cached inline code will reduce an HTTP request or considerably shrink the size of the consolidated global file Search Submission Do you have a valid XML sitemap Have you submitted your site for search engine indexing Register your domain in Google Webmaster Tools cre ate the validation file as instructed by Google and then create an XML sitemap as described in the Sitemaps section of Webmaster Tools Listing 3 shows an example of how to easily generate a sitemap in PHP The XML that gets output can be seen in listing 4 After launch you will need to log into Webmaster Tools and tell Google the URL of the sitemap for crawling This will Pre Launch Checklist get Google to queue indexing of your new site so that it
5. PHP and makes heavy use of XML Furthermore he is a trainer regular author writing articles for the German PHP Magazine co authoring books and speaking at PHP conferences In the unusual case of spare time he helps maintaining the German translation of the PHP manual COLUMN 1 Thinking in Circles by Marco Tabini As a software architect I envy him Badly As a business person I envy him even more Embedded systems can be very challenging to work with For example one of the systems this friend of mine has worked on was required to collect seismic data for up to four months at a time in an Antarctic station on a single battery pack and in temperatures that sometimes exceed 50 C on the wrong side of the Celsius scale I ll let you imagine the contortions his team has to go through to make that happen On the other hand however he has the privilege of working with technology that is well understood The limitations that he has to deal with today power con sumption computational capabilities memory and so forth are nothing compared to the constraints within which applications were required to run as recently as fifteen years ago Most of all however I envy him because he gets to write his application once Today s web development environment is a shambles For all practical purposes every single bit of code has to be written and tested on a combination of no less than six different platforms Windows a
6. lecting mechanism on and off by calling gc_enable or gc_disable respectively Calling those functions has the same effect as turning on or off the mecha nism with the configuration setting It is also possible to force the collection of cycles even if the possible root buffer is not full yet For this you can use the gc_collect_cycles function This function will return how many cycles were collected by the algorithm The rationale behind the ability to turn the mecha nism on and off and to initiate cycle collection your self is that some parts of your application could be FIGURE 1 12 May 2009 www phparch com Garbage Collection highly time sensitive In those cases you might not want the garbage collection mechanism to kick in Of course by turning off the garbage collection for certain parts of your application you do risk creating memory leaks because some possible roots might not fit into the limited root buffer Therefore it is probably wise to call gc collect cycles just before you call gc disable to free up the memory that could be lost through possible roots that are already recorded in the root buffer This then leaves an empty buffer so that there is more space for storing possible roots while the cycle collecting mechanism is turned off In this installment we saw how the garbage collec tion mechanism works and how it is integrated into PHP In the third and final part of the series we will look
7. 2K4 Ph 604 691 1670 Canada Fax 604 691 1678 by Helgi Pormar Porbjornsson COLUMN PEAR Corner QA Teams Truth or Myth In the last couple of years there seems to be a growing trend in the PHP world where application and library developers put out claims that their piece of code is high quality and thoroughly tested Indeed in many cases this is more than true but how can you really guarantee quality like this Quality Assurance What Is It All About You may be wondering what is Quality Assurance QA all about Is it something you might want to start uti lizing for your project I don t want to go too deep into this topic since this is a mere short column but QA can be so many differ ent things depending on who you ask I m going to take the plunge and attempt to give my thoughts on QA teams and hopefully enlighten you in one way or another along the way The QA Team So what is the QA team They are the keepers of qual ity those who aid the developers in maintaining the balance between productivity and chaos these are the people that strive for perfection The QA Team cue theme song for The A team Modern day heroes From my perspective the responsibilities that a QA team would take on range from monitoring the ticket system gathering more accurate information for tick ets verifying tickets and making sure developers are upholding the coding standards and any other stan dards the project is emp
8. 9 o 6 Now that you have everything running it is time to look at some optimizations you can do Firewall To Disable or Not So what steps can one take to optimize PHP perfor mance on Windows There is of course the Firewall and turning that off will yield some improvements we see a 0 2 improvement This means that the Firewall is pretty efficient and there is really no reason to turn it off So in a real world situation leaving the Firewall enabled for security is definitely recommended Environment Variables There are two environmental variables set InstanceMaxRequests Figure 7 and PHP FCGI MAX REQUESTS Figure 8 need to be set to a high value 10000 in this case Why is 10 000 a magic number Indeed the default number is 200 and performance under this default condition is hor rible However increasing the number to 20 000 or 100 000 won t yield a better number either so our test sticks to 10 000 Also a MaxInstances value should FIGURE 7 Edit FastCGI Application Full Path C PHP php cgi exe Arguments ws FastCGl Properties El General EnvironmentVariables Collection InstanceMaxRequests 10000 MaxInstances El Process
9. Alternatively you can use the console CVS tools also installed via tortoiseCVS or using the binaries from It is a scaled down version of PHP not very useful yet http cvshome org The procedure is described in de especially if you like to use databases or other more tail at http www php net anoncvs php advanced features so let s activate more options We hope you are still with us the painful part is done now FIGURE 7 Your First Build php exe System Errar e oe 6 6 6 6 6 o Now you have everything you need so you can finally build PHP 5 3 The features requiring external librar ies are not yet available but all the core functionality as well as many widely used extensions can be built OK already Go to the php source directory cd phparch53 vc9 x86 php5 and generate the configure FIGURE 8 script buildconf Microsoft Visual C Debug Library neues a If everything goes well you should see the following text Debug Error haul o o mE uni Babu Module C php sdk phparch53 vc9 x86 php5 gt buildconf C php sdksphparch53 ec Nx8Byphp5NDebug TS3php5ts debug dll File Rebuilding configure js Run Time Check Failure 3 The variable crashrmeibyoucan is being used without being initialized Now
10. return ButtonSetBrowserType onclick input type text id TextBrowserType value input type button id ButtonGetBrowserType value Get Browser Type onclick return ButtonGetBrowserType onclick Please take note of the button onclick event handlers which we will implement simply like Listing 3 27 May 2009 www phparch com The last thing we need to do to close the Silverlight DOM interop loop is to call JavaScript functions from our compiled Silverlight code First we need a JavaScript function to call so let s add one like this function globalJSMethod strParamGGS Just pop up a window and show whatever is in the parameter alert strParamGGS Then we need Visual Basic code in our Silverlight ap plication to call our JavaScript function To do this we ll add a Subroutine to the Visual Basic code in the App xaml vb file of our Silverlight Application A Subroutine or Sub in Visual Basic is simply a Function that doesn t have a return value See Listing 4 So we have a JavaScript function on the page to call and a Visual Basic method that calls it All we need to do is wire up our user interface to invoke the Visual Basic Method We ll need a page level event to catch so we ll set up an HTML button Imports System Windows Browser lt ScriptableTypeQ gt _ PublicClass MyScriptableManagedType ScriptableMember _ PublicFunction CustomStringFormatter ByVal str
11. so it s vital to define the risks and results a failure in any of the named categories may cause For example let s start with the server the ap plication is running on The housing location and type of uplink are as important as the operating system and software the versions in use and the hardware plat form Hardening the system removing unneeded services that come with a default installation or enforcing se curity rules like limiting shell access to a certain set of IP addresses and users should be considered part of the installation process It is not a reoccurring task per se yet it s an important prerequisite for a secure 49 May 2009 www phparch com ee environment Thinking about the uplink and location for the server might not look very relevant on first glimpse but it is yet another key factor in the broader picture No matter how much time and money you spend on securing the services reachable via remote connections it s wasted if there is no security proto col for physical access to the machine There s also no point in securing only one system while leaving other parts of the infrastructure unprotected Imagine a web server protected by an application level firewall hosted on a sealed box making it extremely hard to hack into but having the database the website relies on running unprotected on the same or a 2nd box with a standard default login granting administrative privileges Whether there is justificati
12. the specified product is no longer 539 99 and the sqlsrv rows affected function will indicate that no rows were affected by the query Sglsrv begin transaction conn sql UPDATE Production Product SET ListPrice ListPrice 2 WHERE ProductID AND ListPrice productId 999 listPrice 539 99 params array productId listPrice 9 stmt sqlsrv_query conn sql params COND W p 11 rowsAffected sqlsrv rows affected stmt 12 if rowsAffected 1 sqlsrv_commit conn 14 echo Transaction committed n 15 else 16 sglsrv rollback conn JUS echo Query affected rowsAffected row s n 18 echo Transaction rolled back n 19 sql INSERT INTO Orders CustomerID OrderDate VALUES SELECT SCOPE IDENTITY AS OrderID customerId ALFKI orderDate date create params array customerId orderDate COND B UJ p stmt sglsrv query conn sql params echo sqlsrv rows affected stmt row s affected n H vo Sglsrv next result stmt row sglsrv fetch array stmt echo New OrderID row 0 An N 42 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP Working with Transactions e 6 9 0
13. Basic Silverlight code can call our JavaScript function named globalJSMethod To do this we need to add two bits of code to your App xaml vb file First we need a delegate to the Visual Basic method that we want to bind to the HTML Button s click event We create this by adding the fol lowing line of code to the Application Startup event in the App xaml vb file Create a delegate for local Visual Basic Method Dim del AsNew EventHandler AddressOfMe CallGlobalJSMethod One last line of code in the App xamL vb file will con nect the HTML Button s Click event to our VB code Hookup that delegates up to the click event a button on the html page doc GetElementById btnCallJSMethod AttachEvent click del Now when we click on btnCallJSMethod the click event is caught in the Silverlight Application and the Visual Basic code is executed see Figure 7 FEATURE Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM Conclusion eo e 9 0 o o o 0 o 9 The DOM integration capabilities of Silverlight matter to the PHP developer because it serves as the bridge between the applications that we write in PHP or any dynamic web development language and the new func tionality for which we could use Silverlight Of course this is just th
14. Model Activity Timeout Advanced IdleTimeout QueueLength RapidFailPerMinute RequestTimeaut ActivityTimeout Specifies the time in seconds that a FastCGI process for this application is allowed to run without communicating with ITS FIGURE 8 EnvironmentVariables Collection Editor PHP FCGI MAX REQUESTS properties PHP FCGI MAX R 10000 ok a 32 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows be higher than the number of the system s CPU core Theoretically the number of cores should match the number of FCGI MaxInstances However after chang ing the number of MaxInstances n cores equal to the Maxinstances does not show the optimal performance results This is possibly related to context switching so increasing this number slightly could result in better performance numbers A drastic increase in this number negatively impacts performance For example for serv ers with 8 cores our testing has shown that you get the best performance when FCGI MaxInstances number is set to 10 How do you optimize PHP on Windows Recommended php ini Settings e 9 o 9 The following table lists settings that you use to configure PHP for optimal performance and to make
15. PHP In fact many of the libraries used to build PHP 5 2 or older were last built in 1997 and the source code that was used for them was lost to the ages Only a single developer was taking care of the Windows builds snapshots and releases and no clear build instructions existed Things became even more complicated when somebody had to reproduce the builds using the exact same configuration to create binary compatible extensions or to simply try to update a dependency library Many of the critical PHP features depend on external libraries The use of these libraries greatly helps PHP provide the incredible rich set of features it has today These libraries are available on every major distribu tion and are frequently updated For Windows we have to do extra work for these libraries as 90 of them do not provide compatible binaries or in some cases do not provide binaries at all And this is where the real trouble began very few li braries were kept up to date It was impossible to trace which sources were used to build them which version or patches were used Additionally many new features were simply not available on Windows Another issue was the compiler that was used to FIGURE 1 _ Microsoft Visual C 2008 Express Edition with 5 1 Setup Send Feedback Ew Microsoft yl Visual C 2008 Express Edition _ Select the location where you would like to install Microsoft Visual C 2008 Express Editi
16. Program Management at ihe Microsoft Open Source Technology Center OSTC where he runs the Open Source Software Lab and Novell Joint Interoperability labs Hank has been working with nix and other OSS for over 20 years He started his work at AT amp T doing kernel programming for the SYS V process scheduler used for Digital Telephone switches 5ESS At AT amp T he designed a globally distributed database system before people knew what they were using such golden oldies as It s no secret that the best Companies seeking lt to improve quality amp d efficiency need to send s 4 X their teams to the IT Management Conference where they will learn m tech management from the greatest minds in IT NE Oct 14 16 2009 50 off with rate code phparch FEATURE Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP by David Sceppa Microsoft recently produced a PHP extension to communicate with SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases the SQL Server Driver for PHP This article will cover the basic workings of this new extension demonstrating how to connect to SQL Server execute queries retrieve results and manage transactions Related URLs PHP 5 2 4 n July of 2008 Microsoft released version 1 0 of its first PHP extension the Microsoft SQL Server Driv Other software er for PHP This extension allows PHP developers to e Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008 ta
17. Ruslan Yakushev php architect ISSN 1709 7169 is published twelve times a year by Marco Tabini amp Associates Inc 28 Bombay Ave Toronto ON M3H1B7 Canada Although all possible care has been placed in assuring the accuracy of the contents of this magazine including all associated source code listings and figures the publisher assumes no responsibilities with regards of use of the information contained herein or in all associated material phplarchitect php a the phplarchitect logo Marco Tabini amp Associates Inc and the MTA Logo are trademarks of Marco Tabini amp Associates Inc Contact Information General mailbox info phparch com Editorial editors phparch com Sales amp advertising sales phparch com Printed in Canada Copyright 2003 2009 Marco Tabini amp Associates Inc All Rights Reserved PAYMENT pP eie 2 88 Ne ECHNOLO G Y MOVING BUSINESS REAL TIME REAL SMART They don t get IT Banks do what banks do Take your money Use your money Charge you to access your money We get IT We build software Our code works Download via the Web Bank Agnostic 24 x Test System You get IT FREE e ttp developer e xact com e Influence our development E xact Transactions Canada Contact Information Web www e xact com Trading Symbol EXZ U Suite 304 134 Abbot Street Toll Free 1 877 303 9228 Email comments exact com Listing CDNX Vancouver 6
18. SELECT ReviewerName EmailAddress ReviewDate FROM Production ProductReview WHERE ProductID 937 stmt sqlsrv_query conn sql echo Name sqlsrv_get_field stmt 0 n echo Email sqlsrv_get_field stmt 1 n echo Date sglsrv get field stmt 2 il 2 3 4 5 6 while sglsrv fetch stmt 7 8 9 0 SQLSRV PHPTYPE STRING SQLSRV ENC CHAR n 1 while row sqlsrv fetch array S stmt echo Srow ReviewerName Srow EmailAddress n You can also retrieve the contents of a row as a PHP object rather than an array by calling sqlsrv fetch object Fetch Results Field By Field e e 9 6 o o o 0 o 0 o o 9 The SQL Server Driver for PHP also allows you to fetch the results of a query on a field by field basis using sqlsrv get field As part of this functionality you can specify the desired field type for each field you retrieve For example you may want to retrieve the contents of a SQL Server datetime column as a PHP string The code in Listing 1 demonstrates some of the flexibility available via sqlsrv get field The code calls sqlsrv fetch to fetch the contents of each row and then calls sqlsrv get field to retrieve the contents of each individual field After reaching th
19. SetAttribute value Text from VB Managed Code in Silverlight Object EndSub With the Imports System Windows Browser namespace imported we have easy access to the browser s DOM object We grab a reference to it from HtmlPage Document and then we can use the SetProperty and SetAttribute methods to control the textbox in our web page First we enable the control by setting the disabled property to false and then we populate the textbox with a string of our choosing by calling SetAttribute on the value attribute Note we have no JavaScript events or code that access our MCText textbox It all happens from compiled code in our Silverlight Application Running the app shows that when the page first ren ders the textbox says HTML Text Value from the brows er but in a second when the Silverlight control is initialized the contents of the textbox change to read Text from VB Managed Code in Silverlight Object Voila Silverlight code is manipulating the DOM but what if we want to call compiled code in the Silverlight application in response to some action that the user takes in the browser We need to be able to call that Silverlight code from our client side JavaScript We can accomplish this by exposing a method in our Silverlight code as a ScriptableMember But first we need a class in our Silverlight code that we want to expose to our client side JavaScript So I ll create a new Visual Basic Class named MyScriptableManaged
20. Users Group Brasilia DF Brazil http www phpdf org br GOPHP Grupo de Desen volvedores PHP de Goias Brazil Goias Brazil http www gophp com br PHP Maranhiao Sao Luis Maranh o Brazil http br groups yahoo com group php maranhao PHP MS Users Group of Mato Grosso do Sul Mato Grosso do Sul Brazil http www phpms org PHP MG Minas Gerais Brazil http www phpmg com PHP Paraiba Paraiba Brazil http groups google com br group php pb PHPSC Grupo de Usu rios de PHP do Estado de Santa Catarina Florian polis Santa Catarina Brazil http www phpsc com br PHP SP Sao Paulo Brazil http www phpsp org br PHP Rio Rio de Janeiro Brazil http www phprio org PHP London London England http www phplondon org Irish PHP Users Group Cork Cork Ireland http www php ie Irish PHP Users Group National Dublin Ireland http www php ie Irish PHP Users Group Monaghan Ireland http www php ie New Zealand PHP Users Group Auckland New Zealand http www phpug org nz Auckland PHP Meetup Auckland New Zealand http php meetup com 10 PHPBarcelona PHP Barce lona User Group Barcelona Spain http phpbarcelona org Front Range PHP Users Group Colorado Springs CO USA http www frontrangephp org Atlanta PHP Atlanta GA USA http atlantaphp org CIAPUG Central Iowa Area PHP User Group Des Moines Iowa USA http www ciapug
21. Windows for quite a few years now even as far back as PHP 3 In fact it was more than 10 years ago that PHP received an Internet Information Server interface but PHP Support for Windows has never been as good as on nix platforms For the history fans there is a PHP museum for all re leases source or binaries at http museum php net Related URLs PHP 5 x Other Software e Windows XP SP2 or later vista 2000 server 2003 2008 or win7 e Visual c 2008 any version free version available here http www microsoft com express download e Microsoft Platform SDK 6 1 http www microsoft com downloads details aspx FamilyID e6e1c3df a74F 4207 8586 711ebe331cdc amp displaylangzen Optional e CVS client for example http www tortoisecvs org e DAEMON Tools Lite http www daemon tools cc or any other virtual drive software Useful Related Links e http windows php net e http windows php net downloads hp libs builds Support Section IRC Channel Freenode php dev win Windows Internals mailing list http www php Compiling PHP used to be an adventure of epic pro portion Build problems dependency issues and non compatible libraries were just some of the challenges and only the hardy prevailed in completing a build of PHP for Windows The various dependencies were not ported to Windows and for those that were finding working ports was sometimes even harder than build ing
22. and a text based payload As the lee oce data is retrieved it is stored locally in client side isolated storage so that the same data need not be re downloaded unless it s desirable to do so And maybe it all happens FIGURE 2 4 Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight 2 Developer Reference www silverlight net Controls Tools System Windows Appa uten t azam GO Visual Studio System ComponentModel System Windows Media Brush and remform apport System Windows Threading System Windows Media Animation ter Dapatcher T emen presentation core presentation ossen E gt foundation Expression Studio System Windows Controls Contr Metot ement See Cont vwari base classes S e ed AUTE New amp changed functonsiity in Soveniegt 2 Beta 1 23 May 2009 www phparch com while we are watching a streaming video see Figure 1 The complete feature set delivered by Silverlight is much larger as the developers diagram illustrates in Figure 2 Now that we ve spent some time thinking about how Silverlight might be used by a client side developer and have taken a 10 000 foot peek at just some of the functionality that Silverlight contains Let s move on to some technical specifics According to Wikipedia Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug in that enables features such as animation vector graphics and audio video playback that characterize rich Intern
23. as your PHP code you can specify either local or as the server name For example the following line of code establishes a connection to the local machine conn sqlsrv_connect SQLExpress Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP FEATURE The SQL Server Driver for PHP uses Windows Authentication by default If you do not specify a user name or password the driver will attempt to connect to the SQL Server instance using the credentials of the process that s running the code Remember that code running in a Web based PHP application will not run in a process using the user s credentials by default For example PHP code running in Microsoft Internet Information Services 7 0 the process will use the local IUSR account s credentials by default You can specify a number of different options such as a user name password database etc when con necting to SQL Server by using the second argument in the sqlsrv connect function Supply the list of connec tion attributes and values in an array as shown here connOptions array UID gt MyUser PWD gt MyPassword Database gt AdventureWorks conn sqlsrv_connect SQLExpress SconnOptions The SQL Server Driver for PHP uses connection pool ing by default With this option enabled the physi cal connection to the database is pooled rather than closed when you call sqlsrv_close or when the con nection variable falls out of
24. build of PHP php5 dll should use the non thread safe version of the driver while developers working with a thread safe build of PHP php5ts dll should use the thread safe version of the driver Note Guidance on PHP on the IIS site http www iis net php recommends using the non thread safe version of PHP for performance and security reasons Once you ve copied the appropriate build of the driver in the PHP extension directory edit the php ini file to tell the PHP engine to load the driver assembly Developers working with the non thread safe version of the driver should add the following entry to the Dynamics Extension section extension php sqlsrv dll Developers working with the thread safe ver sion of the driver should add the following instead extension php sqlsrv ts dll Additional Required Components e 6 e e 6 6 e o o o o The SQL Server Driver for PHP does not communicate directly with SQL Server Instead the driver relies on the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client ODBC Driver to handle the communication with SQL Server The SQL Server Driver for PHP is essentially a very thin layer atop the ODBC driver You can download the ODBC driver here http msdn microsoft com en us library cc296170 SQL 90 aspx Microsoft continues to
25. entry in the php ini for the PHP process This switch can be used to set a PHP setting that makes the arguments string unique Assume that there are two Web sites website1 com and website2 com and each must have its own PHP settings You can create the FastCGI process pools by using the following appcmd exe commands appcmd exe set config section system webServer fastCgi fullPath C php php cgi exe arguments d open_basedir C inetpub websiteN com commit apphost C gt windir system32 inetsrv appcmd set config sitel section system webServer handlers namez PHP448 via FastCGI pathz php verbz modules FastCgiModule scriptProcessor c php448 php exe resourceType Either C gt windir system32 inetsrv appcmd set config site2 section system webServer handlers namez PHP521 via FastCGI pathz php verbz modules FastCgiModule scriptProcessor c php521 php cgi exe resourceType Either C gt windir system32 inetsrv appcmd set config site3 section system webServer handlers name PHP525nts_via_FastCGI path php verb modules FastCgiModule scriptProcessor c php525nts php cgi exe resourceType Either 35 May 2009 www phparch com our directory Sydney PHP Group Sydney Australia http www sydphp org PHPBelgium Belgium http phpbelgium be Ceara PHP Users Group Ceara Brazil http cepug org PHPDF Distrito Federal PHP
26. information cscript fcgiconfig js set section PHP websiteN com EnvironmentVars PHPRC C Inetpub websiteN com Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows FEATURE After you run these commands when you examine the fcgiext ini file you will see the configuration sections updated as follows User Group Directory If your user group is not listed send an e mail to beth phparch com and let us know the details so we can include it in PHP websiteN com ExePath C php php cgi exe EnvironmentVars PHPRC C Inetpub websiteN com Per Site Configuration in IIS 7 0 Creating an independent configuration for each PHP Web site in IIS 7 0 requires two procedures creating a separate process pool for each site and specifying the location of the php ini file for each site Creating Per site PHP Process Pools If each Web site has its own application pool which is a recommended practice for IIS 7 0 it is possible to associate a dedicated FastCGI process pool with each Web site A FastCGI process pool is uniquely identified by the combination of fullPath and arguments proper ties when you use the appcmd exe command to create the process pools Therefore if it is necessary to create several FastCGI process pools for the same process ex ecutable such as php cgi exe you can use the argu ments attribute to distinguish process pool definitions In addition with php cgi exe processes the command line switch d can be used to define an
27. it more secure To make the changes locate and open the php ini file and then change the configuration set tings to the values shown in Listing 1 After you update the php ini file do not forget to recycle the IIS application pool that is used to host your PHP application Recycling the application pool ensures that the PHP executable picks up the updated configuration settings To quickly recycle an application pool in IIS 7 0 you can use the following command line command WINDIR system32 inetsrv appcemd recycle APPPOOL NameOfApplicationPool Disable luafv sys If you run PHP on Windows 2008 or Vista there is a further step you can take to optimize performance This step is most certainly optional and needs to be under stood before you do this This part certainly falls under the User Beware category and you need to under stand what it means to do this step and decide if it is the right thing to do for your particular system setup UAC comes with a driver called the UAC File Virtualization Filter Driver or luafv sys What does this Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows FEATURE driver do Well this driver ensures that older installed version on your server legacy applications that want to write to protected areas e g windows system32 etc are intercepted and Configuring IIS 5 1 and IIS 6 0 for re directed automatically to an area that the user is allowed to write to This way older applications that Multipl
28. the C Inetpub website1 com folder and that the php ini for website2 com is located in the C Inetpub website2 com folder You can configure the FastCGI process pools to set the PHPRC server variable Biz Tech Synergy You missed this morning s scrum I was waiting for our new skills app could have been built 10x faster using PHP instead of the platform specified IT Management Conference www ManageIT me New York City 36 May 2009 www phparch com You need better prioritization 2 organization amp time management FEATURE Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows to point to the php ini files located in root sites fold ers by using the following command for website1 com and website2 com appemd exe set config section system webServer fastCgi fullPath C php php cgi exe arguments d open _basedir C inetpub websiteN com environmentVariables name PHPRC value C inetpub websiteN com commit apphost This configuration also ensures that if there is no php ini file found in the location specified by the PHPRC environment variable PHP will fall back to using the default php ini file located in the same folder where php cgi exe is located Even though PHP has gone through tremendous changes in the last 12 months and is constantly evolv ing we hope this article has provided you with a good overview on how to configure and optimize PHP on Windows HANK JANSSEN is the Director of
29. the jungle Photo courtesy of Marcia courtesy of Rein Velt Ringel and Alan Seiden Do you have photos of your ElePHPant We would love to print them Send us a high resolution image or if you have the high resolution image posted online just send us the link of your ElePHPant We ll choose several photos a month to publish What s New at Python Magazine Learn more at http pythonmagazine com May 2009 Topics Image Processing With Python Web Site Security With repoze who Eugen Wintersberger and repoze what Gustavo Narea Learning PyObjC Four Basic Data Types JC Cruz An Introduction to PyGTK How to Survive Sorting in Python 3 Mark Mruss Jarret Hardie and much more NESL CESS NET INTERNET SOLUTIONS POPULAR SHARED HOSTING PACKAGES A MINI ME 500 MB Storage 15 GB Transfer 50 E Mail Accounts 25 Subdomains 25 MySQL Databases PHP5 MySQL 4 1 X SITEWORX control panel M sMALL BIZ 2 95 mo 2000 MB Storage 50 GB Transfer 200 E Mail Accounts 75 Subdomains 75 MySQL Databases PHP5 MySQL 4 1 X SITEWORX control panel POPULAR RESELLER HOSTING PACKAGES SM NExRESELL l6 5 900 MB Storage 30 GB Transfer Unlimited MySQL Databases Host 30 Domains PHP5 MYSQL 4 1 X NODEWORX Reseller Access mo WDR NEXRESELL 2 97 7500 MB Storage 100 GB Transfer Unlimited MySQL Databases Host Unlimited Domains PHP5 MySQL 4 1 X NODEWORX Reseller Access mo All of our server
30. want to help answer other developers questions are also welcome Our forum can be found at the following URL http social msdn microsoft com Forums en US sqldriverforphp threads FEATURE PRE LAUNCH CHECKLIST by Eric David Benari Shortly after most new sites are launched Related URLs the creators discover that some necessary elements have been forgotten Pilots PHP 3 0 2 employ a pre flight checklist to avoid Other Software e Apache with headers expires and deflate problems while airborne so it is only ie eb natural that web sites should have a pre launch checklist to avoid problems once Related URLs e Validate your code http validator w3 org users begin visiting the site This 1s more e Minification http code google com p minif e Google Webmaster Tools of a detailed checklist than a tutorial http www google com webmasters tools NEC e YSlow http developer yahoo com yslow but every topic In the List can easily be e memcached http www danga com memcached Googled for more info if needed 44 May 2009 www phparch com Pre Launch Checklist Error Management oe o o o o o Does your site have a 404 Not Found page that includes links to functional pages If no
31. will show up in the Google search results Next add your sitemap to your robots txt User agent Disallow Sitemap sitemap Then submit the site to Yahoo Directory Yahoo Search MSN and DMOZ To conquer the hundreds of other search engines I find it easiest to use a URL submission service which submits the site to many engines with a few quick clicks serve all your static files from a RAM disk Trim Down Headers Are your server responses only consisting of valuable data Turn off expose php in your php ini file and remove any unnecessary page headers to reduce the size of each request Also check the site with YSlow and follow its suggestions Compress Throughput Have you enabled gzip compression on your web server Gzip greatly improves your network throughput at the cost of a negligible amount of CPU overhead Listing 2 contains an example of enabling gzip within the Apache configuration file Domain Distribution e e e 6 6 0 o o 0 o o 9 0 6 Are the external files accessed by your site images JS CSS etc distributed over four domains This may seem strange but four is a magic number Many browsers by default will not make more than two simultaneous connections to a single domain but it will make many connections
32. your face This is just the tip of the iceberg and as you may have noticed QA teams need to able to touch every as pect of the product know it inside out and play nicely with everyone inside the project They are indeed the most powerful weapon a project manager can have in his her arsenal and if used correctly the whole team will be more productive and produce higher quality products on time Well that s the general idea at least They Are Around Even When You Think They Aren t e e e o o o o o More often than not projects will have a QA team or at least QA people without anyone involved even knowing about it Just think for a moment about all of those projects that you have come across that are high quality and are well managed yet have no official QA team nor any mention of QA anywhere This scenario tends to happen when you have smaller companies or smaller development teams within compa nies They become their own QA team usually without appointing someone to take care of the bug system with no one doing proper bug triage sessions and with verifications simply happening when someone tries to fix the bug and ends up chasing down the person that filed the report just to get enough information to be able t
33. 9 www phparch com consists of name value pairs You could use this code to check to see if the connection attempt failed and display error information if a failure occurred if false foreach sqlsrv errors as Serror echo SQLSTATE Serror SQLSTATE n echo Code Serror code n echo Message S error message n As a general rule the driver s functions allow you to follow this error handling approach of checking to see if a call to the driver returned false and then using sqlsrv errors to retrieve error information Other cod ing examples omit error checking for the sake of brev ity Executing d Query The simplest way to execute a query using the SQL Server Driver for PHP is to call the sqlsrv query func tion and specify both the connection on which you want to execute the query and the query string as shown here sql SELECT ReviewerName EmailAddress FROM Production ProductReview stmt query S conn sql Fetching Results Once you ve executed a query you can retrieve the results in a number of different ways The simplest way is to call sqlsrv fetch array which will return the contents of the current row as an array By default you can access the value for a particular field by specify ing either the numeric index 0 based or the field name Once you ve reached the end of the resultset the sqlsrv fetch array function returns null 591
34. ARAM IN isp array output SQLSRV_PARAM_OUT 14 stmt sqlsrv query conn sql params 16 echo inputl input2 output n sql SELECT ReviewerName EmailAddress FROM Production ProductReview WHERE ProductID productId 0 stmt sqlsrv_prepare conn sql array productId productIds array 937 709 798 foreach productIds as val 9 productId val 10 sqlsrv_execute stmt I echo Reviewers for ProductID productId An DU BW nJ 12 while row sqlsrv fetch array stmt echo row ReviewerName 14 row EmailAddress An 16 echo Nn Server Driver for PHP will report an error since the query ran successfully To determine if the query affected the desired number of rows use the sqlsrv rows affected function Ssql UPDATE Production Product SET ListPrice ListPrice 2 WHERE ProductID AND ListPrice SproductiId 999 SlistPrice 539 99 Sparams array S productId S listPrice Sstmt sqlsrv query S conn sql Sparams echo sqisrv rows affected Sstmt rows affected Running this code once should double the list price for the specified product assuming the list price for the product is initially set to 539 99 and the sqlsrv rows affected function will indicate that one row was affected Running the query a second time will not affect any rows because the list price for
35. Any of the above listed Windows versions should work We actually used the public beta of Windows 7 for this article Before you start make sure you have enough free space to install the different tools and components required to compile PHP We usually try to have five to six or so GB of disk space free before we do a clean in stall for the build environment Visual Studio Express is not very large but with all the libraries tools sources as well as the temporary object files created during the build process we will use up a fair amount of space and the platform SDK requires 3GB for the install pro cess FIGURE 3 The first large download is the VC9 compiler Visual C 2008 If you have not downloaded it yet fetch it here http www microsoft com express download If you plan to use the compiler on non network connected machines or if you like to have a CD at hand you can choose the offline install option using the ISO down load It can be found at the bottom of the page in the Offline Install box Use a tool like Daemon Tools Lite to mount the iso and run the setup or simply use the web installer Figure 1 shows the last form before the install begins using the web installer You should see similar options The second download is the Platform SDK 6 1 which can be found here http www microsoft com downloads details aspx FamilyID e6e1c3df a74f 4207 8586 711ebe331cdc amp displaylang en Figure 2 shows the necessary op
36. Apache users can do this easily via the config files either in htaccess or httpd conf See Listing 2 1 Directory r YOURSITE gt 2 IfModule mod deflate c 3 SetOutputFilter DEFLATE 4 BrowserMatch AMozilla 4 gzip only text html 5 BrowserMatch Mozilla 4N 0 678 no gzip 6 BrowserMatch bMSI E no gzip gzip only text html 7 SetEnvIfNoCase Request URI 8 gif jpe g png no gzip dont vary 9 IfModule mod_headers c gt Header append Vary User Agent env dont vary VE Header unset ETag D IfModule IBE lt IfModule gt 14 FileETag None E foe Options FollowSymLinks 1e Allow from all 18 19 AllowOverride None 20r Include r YOURSITE htaccess 21 Directory 22 23 lt IfModule mod_expires c gt 24 Directory r NYOURSITENCsS 25 ExpiresActive on 26 ExpiresDefault access plus 1 month Die lt Directory gt ASF Directory r YOURSITE images gt 29 ExpiresActive on 30 ExpiresDefault access plus 1 month 31 lt Directory gt 32 Directory r YOURSITE gt 33 Files favicon ico 34 ExpiresActive on 355 ExpiresDefault access plus 1 month 36 Files 3s lt Directory gt 38 IfModule 39 FEATURE FEATURE Control Search Engine Indexing Do you have a robots txt in your webroot All web sites should have a valid robots txt file even if every page on the site is meant to be indexed User agent Disallow Neglecting to have
37. AsString AsString Return str ToUpper EndFunction EndClass function ButtonSetBrowserType onclick Set the Name property in our Silverlight Object with the value of the browser application we re running in s Cctl Content mySLapp Name navigator appName COND UI BW function ButtonGetBrowserType_onclick 9 10 Fetch the name property value from the SIlverlight 11 Object and display it in the textbox Tias TextBrowserType value slCtl Content mySLapp Name 13 1 1 Execute Business Logic Here get the current time 2 Call a global Javascript method defined on the HTML page 3 PrivateSub callalobaljSMethod Byval sender AsObject 4 ByVal e As EventArgs 5 Dim strMS AsString DateTime Now Millisecond ToString 6 Dim strTime AsString Silverlight Says 7 ControlChars NewLine DateTime Now ToLongTimeString 8 MS StrMS 9 HtmlPage window Invoke globalJSMethod strTime 0 EndSub input type button id btnCallJSMethod value Silverlight catches the DOM Event and Calls a JavaScript Method Notice that our button definition does NOT contain a click event handler specification It s just an HTML button sitting on the page Our Silverlight application could catch any JavaScript event we re just going to use a simple button click event Now we can configure our Silverlight Application to catch that button s click event and then our Visual
38. HP on Windows you are more than welcome You can find our mailing list and IRC channel in the Support Section FIGURE 12 Cal Stuck Lang pgi deus dii het vod urat neuen lorem ELDER fw urat rurai oom are Cw cnat gh pies c eres debug dilzend do f comen Fadper SPEO nid daba void aures bee Lise SES Dx TEC debug dl Dos PCALL SPEC _ CONST PHANDLER zen daba exengbs vol term Hwcngkz45 d10 Line 1565 dabas dle tel sand jr op rage De TO bore Jessica dien Lune 105 Del yee dd di rend ev wranchar nervo pira lu Cha xui woa ruis Hei C Sheth debug dilzend eva sn esx char zirsDe O45Ltc1e mM shut nies ODODODO char string roses CH L ha 30 imb handle excentior pho excitet anger char apes EACUS AN Lina 1 LOI Cre LE E ne eI me S Call Sack proto void phpinfo int what Output a page of useful information about PHP and the current request PHP FUNCTION phpinfo long flag PHP INFO ALL CON C n BW I Our bug begins here 9 char crashmeifyoucan 10 11 printf s n crashmeifyoucan 12 and ends here i HANK JANSSEN is the Director of Program Management at the Microso
39. Hank Janssen It has been pretty hard in the past to figure out how to install and configure PHP on Windows Additionally when you did get it installed finding information on how to optimize PHP was even harder to find Due to the recent work done by the PHP Community and Microsoft doing exactly that is now easier than ever using the Web server included with the operat ing system Internet Information Services IIS However many real life PHP applications could not be hosted on Windows in a production environment due to limitations in the technologies IIS offered for running PHP applications namely using the Common Gateway Interface CGI or using the PHP ISAPI extension CGI requires separate executables that are launched by the Web server for each request in order to pro cess the request and generate dynamic responses CGI enables reliable execution of PHP on IIS by executing exactly one request per process However PHP applica tions can have poor performance when running via CGI because of the high cost of starting and shutting down a Windows process for each request PHP applications that use the IIS high performance multi threaded ISAPI interface have much better per formance However they would often suffer from insta bility due to lack of thread safety in some popular PHP extensions To address these problems built in FastCGI support has been introduced in IIS 7 0 and a FastCGI extension I has always been
40. Type and decorate the class with the ScriptableType attribute In the MyScriptableManagedType vb file create a method to convert a string to all upper case Then we can decorate the method that we want to expose with the ScriptableMember attribute Remember to import the System Windows Browser namespace The code for our new class looks Listing 2 26 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM Next we need to register our new scriptable type with the web page so in our Silverlight Application_ Startup method we need to add a couple of lines of code Set upscriptable managed type for access from JavaScript Dim smt As MyScriptableManagedType New MyScriptableManagedType HtmlPage RegisterScriptableObject mySLapp smt The first line after the comment creates an object instance of our new class and the second line registers the object that we just created with the HTML DOM and tells the DOM to use the name mySLapp to reference it That s all we need on the Silverlight side On the JavaScript side we need to implement an event handler for the Silverlight onLoad event and in that handler we need to fetch a JavaScript accessible reference to the loaded Silverlight Object We can do this with a few lines of JavaScript code var slctl null Create a JavaScript Variable to hold the Silverlight App Reference function pluginLoaded sender args slctl send
41. aml vb I Page xaml vb FIGURE 6 HELLO WORLD _ Format Text 25 May 2009 www phparch com Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM FEATURE 1 2 0 31005 0 and the following section that provides version upgrading guidance to the user Next we ll look at the two XAML files that were cre ated when we selected the Silverlight project type and their associated Code Behind files see Figure 5 The Page xaml file is the base user interface of your Silverlight application and is loaded when the applica tion activates In Page xaml we can use UI controls to define our user interface and then handle events from them in the Code Behind file The App xaml file is typically used to declare re sources such as brush and style objects that are shared across the application The Code Behind file for the App xaml file can be used to handle application level events like Application Startup Application Exit and Application UnhandledException Since our Silverlight application will be used to execute logic and will have no Silverlight UI graphics we ll be working with App xaml vb Note that I just happened to choose Visual Basic but you can write your Silverlight applica tion in any supported NET language Our first exercise will be to populate an element in the HTML DOM from the compiled code in the Silverlight object when the Silverlight object loads After adding a textbox element to th
42. apshot build enable debug As you can see below you are now getting a nice set of features More than thirty extensions are enabled and still no single external dependency Enabled extensions Extension Mode Extension Mode bcmath static odbc static calendar static pere static com dotnet static pdo static ctype static pdo mysql shared date static pdo odbc shared ereg static pdo sqlite shared exif shared phar static filter static reflection static ftp static session static hash static shmop shared json static sockets shared mbstring shared spl static mysql shared sqlite shared mysqli shared sqlite3 shared mysqind static standard static tokenizer static Now that you are ready to compile PHP it is time to use some of the external libraries It is very straight forward to add any libraries to your development tree 18 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Installing PHP on Windows Each architecture tree vc9 x86 for example contains a deps directory It is used to store all files used to build or run PHP Tt is comparable to the usr or opt directo ries if you are familiar with a nix platform It is com posed of three sub directories see Figure 4 again e bin contains all DLLs or libraries specific bi
43. are implemented by any other language vender Second it means that a significant subset of the NET Framework becomes available to code that will be running on the client in the browser Here are some highlights e WPF UI Framework Silverlight 2 includes a rich WPF based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine as well as rich support for higher level UI capabilities like controls layout management data binding styles and template skinning The WPF UI framework in Silverlight is a subset of the WPF UI framework features in the full NET Framework and enables developers to re use skills controls code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications as well as rich desktop Windows applications Rich Controls Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applica tions and includes core form controls textbox checkbox radio button etc built in layout management panels StackPanel Grid Panel 22 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM etc common functionality controls Slider ScrollViewer Calendar DatePicker etc and data manipulation controls DataGrid ListBox etc The built in controls support a rich con trol styling and templating model which en ables developers and designers to collaborate together to b
44. arkable answer While a significant amount of them use a framework the most popular framework in such polls is often my own framework I asked Matthew what he thinks of these home grown frameworks I ve actually built my own a couple of times There s a saying in PHP circles I m not sure who originated it but it goes Every PHP developer codes 2 5 frameworks My take on it is that the first is always very imperfect and the developer learns from their mistakes The second is much more sound but not as comprehensive as it could be The 0 5 is when they cre ate a framework that extends on an existing one and contribute back features and patches to the existing framework I think there s a lot of merit to coding your own framework You learn a lot about good software architecture and can tailor it exactly to your site or organization s needs So apparently a good approach is to combine the two build your own but on top of an existing one Matthew continues The problem with building your own framework is that you end up duplicating effort others have already done and often don t realize what the pitfalls and edge cases are So this is where build ing on top of another one is good building specific functionality on something common There are times when it s good to have a custom framework if your site needs high availability and excellent performance in all likelihood you ll need to do something custom But that doe
45. at performance considerations and benchmarks FIGURE 2 string one string one eran 0 DERICK RETHANS has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project including the mcrypt date and input filter extensions bug fixes additions and leading the QA team He s a frequent lecturer at conferences the author of phplarchitect s Guide to Date Time Handling and the co author of PHP 5 Power Programming Derick now works as project leader for the eZ components project for eZ systems A S In his spare time he likes to travel hike ski practice photography You can reach him at derick derickrethans nl Installing PHP on Windows Hank Janssen and Pierre Jove Many PHP programmers use PHP on Windows today but most of the core PHP developers work on nix As a result the Windows version of PHP has always lagged behind the other platforms in terms of features and stability Fortunately the situation has improved drastically during the last six or so months with PHP on Windows reaching feature parity with other platforms Developing with PHP on Windows is now easier than ever and in some cases has resulted in important PHP innovations This article explains some of the changes that have been made in PHP 5 3 for Windows and how you can set up a development environment to compile and develop PHP on Windows within minutes Looking Back PHP has been supported on
46. ay 2009 www phparch com Pre Launch Checklist any invalid certificate alerts or similar warnings If your site will need to transmit to the browser securely over the HTTPS protocol then you will need to install an SSL certificate that is registered to your sites domain name and issued by a real certificate authority not self signed If you access your site over SSL by any means other than the domain name e g IP address then the browser will warn you about an invalid certificate If your domain does not yet point to the server then you will need to confirm that this warning will not occur post launch The way to do this is to open your operating system s hosts file in a text editor on Windows this is typically found at C Windows System32 drivers etc hosts and add the following to it on a new line 127 0 0 1 YOURBITE CON The hosts file is usually loaded and cached upon browser startup so you will need to close any browser windows that are already open and then open a new browser window Now navigate directly to your web site via the domain name http YOURSITE com and the page should load normally Next verify SSL https YOURSITE com and you should not receive any browser warnings If this is a new domain have you set up the necessary email accounts Verify that every email address appearing on your site is functional Suggestions If your pre launch routine involves any other elements then please conta
47. c gt http www YOURSITE com news loc 9 lt changefreq gt hourly lt changefreq gt 10 lt url gt dn rl 2x lt loc gt http www YOURSITE com contact lt loc gt i3 changefreq month y changefreq 14 furl 15 lt urlset gt 46 May 2009 www phparch com Pre Launch Checklist favicon If you are logging to the same hard disk that serves the web site not an ideal practice then this will also cause a minor performance penalty as the disk needs to write to the log file for each new visitor in between serving the files on your web site Minify JS and CSS files Are your external files as small as they can get Minification is the act of stripping out whitespace and comments as well as implementing other space saving techniques such as consolidating CSS statements and refactoring JavaScript variables to minimize size e g variables showAdvancedSearch and isModernBrowser might become v1 and v2 This typically reduces the file size by about 15 although this amount varies depending on the minification scheme as well as your commenting and white space habits It is critical to always verify that your minified JavaScript still works in IE the JavaScript engine in IE requires a space after certain statement types that FireFox is able to execute flawlessly with one character following the next Consolidate JavaScript and CSS e 6 e e 6 e 6 6 9 o
48. called com piled code in the Silverlight application from some client side JavaScript and we ve populated HTML DOM objects from compiled code in the Silverlight applica tion but what if we need to go the other way We may also need to access properties in our Silverlight object from client side JavaScript code and we may need to call client JavaScript methods from compiled code in our Silverlight classes Well no problem First we ll set and get properties in our class that we named MyScriptableManagedType We need a property with accessors so we ll add one to our scriptable type like this Dim name AsString lt ScriptableMember gt _ PublicProperty Name AsString Get Return name EndGet Set ByVal value AsString name value EndSet EndProperty Note the ScriptableMember attribute For more information about attributes in Visual Basic see http msdn microsoft com en us library 39967861 VS 80 aspx There is no executable logic implemented for this property Set simply saves the value passed to it and Get simply returns the current value of the property Since the property is defined as a ScriptableMember we can both Set and Get this property from client side JavaScript code Let s add a Button whose event handler will set the Silverlight object property another that will retrieve it and a textbox to display the value input type button id ButtonSetBrowserType value Set Browser Type onclick
49. criteria when choosing a framework How can one dif ferentiate between the various frameworks out there Matthew There are a number of criteria to consider PHP version is one While PHP 4 support is discontin ued there are a ton of hosts still using it and if you need that support that narrows your choice CakePHP and CodeIgniter for instance still support PHP 4 COLUMN symfony and ZF do not Another consideration is what type of project you re doing If you re porting an existing project to a framework some frameworks will accommodate that better than others Many frameworks are opinionated and make retrofitting to legacy code bases difficult others provide flexibility for this very purpose For green field projects you often want to get up and running as fast as possible For such situ ations take a look at the tooling support available as well as the ability to do things such as generating database tables from metadata One consideration many don t take into account is whether or not a project provides any best practices coding standards project organization recommenda tions etc These are useful to have when you consider long term maintenance of your project And finally frameworks tend to focus on specific core functionality and leave extensions and support to the community so you want to look for a vibrant com munity surrounding the project This is another area where sta
50. ct me through http www ericdavid cc and send them my way Security Roundup The Cost of Security by Arne Blankerts hen asked almost everyone agrees there is We for better security in PHP software Maybe by designing the software with security in mind and thus writing a secure application or by frequently auditing existing code Yet hardly anyone is willing to spend time and therefore money on it It doesn t provide you with the latest cool feature or look fancy It seems you don t gain anything except maybe the respect of other developers It s like writing docu mentation It s the most boring thing to do when you could be hacking the next cool thing tm instead From a marketing perspective simply claiming your website application or library is secure until proven otherwise is way cheaper In Non OpenSource software nobody but you knows the code and its potential problems anyway So you re safe Aren t you Considering the money lost either directly due to fraud and abuse or indirectly by time lost recovering a hacked system or software the let s hope for the best approach is of arguable quality Spending time on a tiny security problem that when exploited will not cause any real trouble or bad press might be consid ered a waste of money The key factor is to find a way to judge where when and to what level security needs to be focused on Obviously there s no such thing as 100 when talk ing about security
51. de This will list the identifiers of all Web sites that are configured in IIS cscript fcgiconfig js add section PHP websiteN com extension php path C php php cgi exe site siteN id After you run these commands open the fcgiext ini file which is located in the following folder AWINDIR system32 inetsrv The fcgiext ini file will contain the following sec tions Types The site ids will be different for your site php 169297538 PHP websitel com php 273357939 PHP website2 com site PHP websitel com ExePath C php php cgi exe PHP website2 com ExePath C php php cgi exe The PHP website1 com and PHP website2 com sections can be used to specify site specific FastCGI configuration settings You can use these sections to specify the path to the php ini file for each of the Web sites When the PHP process starts it determines the loca tion of the php ini configuration file by using vari ous settings One of the places where the PHP process searches for the location of the php ini file is the PHPRC environment variable If the PHP process finds a php ini file in the path specified in this environment variable the process will use that path Otherwise the process reverts to looking in the default location for the php ini file You can use the following command per site to configure FastCGI to set this environment variable to point to the site specific php ini file re placing websiteN com with your
52. de tree run ning either client side or server side Or we could im plement cooperative encryption between our Silverlight client and our server side code The WPF UI framework means that we can use the same skill set to develop Silverlight applications and WPF client applications We can even share some code and UI elements between the two and the Rich Controls coupled with the ability to create user controls means high levels of UI reuse Then when we start to look at the networking stack and the BCL Base Class Library things re ally start to get interesting Just to start thinking Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM about how Silverlight is way more FIGURE 1 than a UI technology imagine a browser based application based Browser App on Silverlight that has multiple Streaming simultaneous threads of execution Audio Video Thread one constantly interacting REST Data with the user interface updat S Server ing its real estate as new data is available Thread two works in the Silverlight App background running business logic that selectively retrieves data from different sources on the internet One is a secure SOAP based web SOAP Application service another data source is a saner simple REST based endpoint and yet another is a high flow data stream that our Silverlight applica a tion communicates with via sockets Nee m to eliminate the overhead of HTTP forage High Frequency Data
53. e YourProjectName TestPage aspx files For simplicity s sake I ll rename the SIlverlightApplications1TEstPage html file to index html Note that SIlverlightApplication1 is simply the name of my project and it s used in the names of the auto generated files You ll notice a Silverlight js file in the project and this line in the head section of our HTML page lt script type text javascript src Silverlight js gt lt script gt This is the Siverlight bootstrapper It makes sure the Silverlight runtime is installed on the client and expos es necessary functionality to JavaScript It s sparsely commented but a quick look at the code will give you the gist of its functionality Also defined in your head section is the JavaScript function onSilverlightError this is a general error catcher for Silverlight and you can replace it with whatever is appropriate for your application In the body of our html page is the lt object gt tag that contains the Silverlight application see Listing 1 The parameters for the Silverlight application are pretty self explanatory but there are a few notable properties First note that the onerror parameter references the JavaScript function defined in our pages head section Note also the version checking parameter and the param name minRuntimeVersion FIGURE 5 Z Solution SilverlightApplicationl Ye S verlightApplicationl Aj My Project App xaml App x
54. e Administration Pack provides a user inter face for editing FastCGI settings in IIS Manager See Figure 3 After you enable support for FastCGI it is time to install and configure PHP Installing PHP Installing PHP on Windows is a straightforward pro cess thanks to the PHP installer package available on the PHP site see Related URLs Be sure to download the installer for the latest non thread safe version of PHP which at the time this article was written was PHP Version 5 2 9 Non thread safe installer A non thread safe build of PHP provides significant performance gains over the standard build by not doing any thread safety checks Thread safety checks are not necessary because FastCGI ensures a single threaded execution environment After you have downloaded and launched the install er accept the license agreement choose the installa tion path and then choose the installation option IIS Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows FEATURE FastCGI See Figure 4 Choosing this option tells the installer to perform the configuration steps in IIS that enable the server to handle PHP Web requests For IIS 5 1 and IIS 6 0 the installer creates a script mapping that instructs ITS to pass all requests for PHP pages php resources to the FastCGI extension You can see this configuration by opening server properties and ed iting the extension mappings as shown in Figure 5 The FastCGI extension in turn is configured to pass th
55. e Versions of PHP e 6 6 6 6 e 6 6 oe 6 o e 0 6 o 6 e o o o 6 for whatever reason want to write to protected system To configure IIS 5 1 and IIS 6 0 for multiple versions of directories do not fail with a write error There is over PHP run the fcgiconfig js script that is provided with head with this and in some instances we have seen the FastCGI extension The script is located in the fol that overhead reach 1096 or so even with applications lowing folder WINDIR system32 inetsrv that do not ever write to protected areas So what happens if you disable this driver Well the short of it is that older legacy applications will The script will create FastCGI script mappings and LISTING 1 fail when they want to write to an area they are not Setting Description allowed to instead of being re directed to an area they upas s f k d h fastcgi impersonate 1 FastCGI under IIS supports the ability can write to If you know your system does not have scultura ume p a calling client This setting allows IIS any of these applications installed then you can dis Va cuc able this driver This is what you need to do to disable u s C uh MC it WARNING This means modifying the registry set cgi fix_path
56. e dialog Figure 8 but instead open Visual C Express Windows gt Programs gt Microsoft Visual C 2008 Express Edition Create a new empty project File gt new gt Project as shown in Figure 9 and save it in the php source directory its lo cation is not important The project will remain empty it is only a dummy project Once you are done you will be able to attach a process to the debugger Select the Debug menu and click on the Attach to Process command The dialog shown in Figure 10 will appear Select php exe and click the attach button Now go back to the error dialog in Figure 8 and click retry The debugger will then catch the error and let you begin the debugging see Figure 11 session exactly where the crash occurred You would certainly prefer to have set a breakpoint earlier at a stage where you know that everything was working That s possible using the DebugBreak macro Modify the phpinfo function using the code in Listing 3 Compile PHP again nmake This time you will need a little pause to attach the 1 Enabled extensions 5 static 6 static 7 pcre static 8 reflection static static static spl standard 23 Build type Debug 24 Thread Safety Yes 25 Compiler 9 Visual C 2008 26 Architecture x86 29 Type nmake to build PHP debugger to the php exe before it crashes JIT de bugger again sleep 10 will give
57. e ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee code injection vulnerabilities enn I H Mt on C CHUA U NUNT ome PHP applications might rely on functions or fea register globals off This setting disables register_globals tures that are available only in certain versions of PHP which prevents PHP from injecting your scripts with global variables that are To host such applications on the same server different defined based on web request data PHP versions must run side by side The IIS FastCGI open_basedir c inetpub This setting restricts where PHP rocesses can read and write in the handler fully supports running multiple versions of PHP on the same Web server safe mode Off These settings disable safe mode Note that the PHP installer does not support instal upas m I O s P t lation of multiple PHP versions side by side Therefore Magnet d nu settings limit script execution n max input time time it is recommended that you download the actual PHP Te eee s memory_limit 16M These settings limit memory usage and binaries from the PHP site and then install and config upload max filesize 2M file sizes for PHP processes post max size 8M ure them using the
58. e end of the resultset sqlsrv fetch returns null and we exit the while loop 1 sql SELECT ReviewerName EmailAddress 2 ReviewDate Comments Jo FROM Production ProductReview 4 WHERE ProductID 937 5 stmt sqlsrv_query conn sql 6 7 while sqlsrv_fetch stmt 8 echo Name sglsrv get field stmt 0 9 echo Email sglsrv get field stmt 1 10 echo Date sqlsrv_get_field stmt 2 SQLSRV PHPTYPE STRING SQLSRV ENC CHAR 125 echo Comments 195 comments sqlsrv get field stmt 3 14 SQLSRV PHPTYPE STREAM SQLSRV ENC CHAR 15 fpassthru comments 16 echo An LZ 1 function DisplayReviews conn productid 2 Use the character as a parameter marker 3 sql SELECT ReviewerName EmailAddress 4 ReviewDate Comments 5 FROM Production ProductReview 6 WHERE ProductID 7 8 Construct an array that contains the parameters 9 params array productId 10 du Execute the query and specify the parameters 12 stmt sqlsrv_query conn sql I3 14 Process the query results 15 16 40 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP Accessing the Contents of a Field as a PHP Stream The sqlsrv_get_field function also allows you retrieve the contents of fields as PHP streams rather than as strings We can change the previous query to return
59. e entry level Now that you know how Silverlight code can interact with the web pages we generate from PHP we can start to explore the kinds of things one can do inside Silverlight applications them selves Silverlight is a vast technology with a plethora of features and capabilities For more information on Developing with Silverlight visit http silverlight net learn learnvideo aspx video 65683 JOE STAGNER joined Microsoft in 2001 as a Technical Evangelist and is now a Microsoft NET team Program Manager Web Tools and Platform A former Developer Community Champion with the Microsoft MSDN Team of Digital Blackbelt fame his development experiences have afforded him the opportunity to create commercial software applications across a wide diversity of technical platforms from Mainframes through UNIX and Linux to Microsoft Technologies on the Intel and Mobile computing platforms In recent years Stagner has been focused on highly performant geoscadlable web application architectures multi platform interoperability and above all writing secure code Get your framework based site up and running in no time Hosting customized ServerGrove WEBHOSTING 60 off an annual VPS hosting product Use coupon code phparch Offer expires Dec 31 2009 Visit http www servergrove com for available php frameworks 28 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows by Ruslan Yakushev and
60. e of 10 000 possible roots although you can REQUIREMENTS PHP 5 3 Useful Related Links e David F Bacon and V T Rajan s paper http www research ibm com people d dfb papers Bacon 1Concurrent pdf e Google Summer of Code http code google com soc 2007 COLUMN alter this by changing the GC_ROOT_BUFFER_MAX_ENTRIES constant in Zend zend_gc c in the PHP source code and re compiling PHP When the garbage collector is turned off the cycle finding algorithm will never run However possible roots will always be recorded in the root buffer no matter whether the garbage collection mechanism has been activated with this configuration setting If the root buffer becomes full with possible roots while the garbage collection mechanism is turned off further possible roots will simply not be recorded Those possible roots that are not recorded will never be analyzed by the algorithm If they were part of a circu lar reference cycle they would never be cleaned up and would create a memory leak The reason why possible roots are recorded even if the mechanism has been disabled is because it s faster to record possible roots than to have to check whether the mechanism is turned on every time a possible root could be found The garbage collection and analysis mechanism itself however can take a considerable amount of time Besides changing the zend enable_gc configuration setting it is also possible to turn the garbage col
61. e page we can populate it in the Silverlight object s Application Startup event handler FIGURE 7 Windows Internet Explorer Silverlight Says 9 21 40 AM MS 88 object data data application x silverlight 2 type application x silverlight 2 widthz 1005 height 100 gt param name source value ClientBin SilverlightApplicationl xap gt param name onerror value onSilverlightError gt param name background value white param name minRuntimeVersion value 2 0 31005 0 gt 9 param name autoUpgrade value true gt 10 a href http go microsoft com fwlink LinkID 124807 11 style text decoration none gt lt img src 12 http go microsoft com fwlink Linkrd 108181 alt Get 13 Microsoft Silverlight style border style none a 14 lt object gt C W input type text id MCText disabled disabled value HTML Text Value from the browser gt First we need access to the browser so at the top of our App xaml vb file we need to import the browser namespace Imports System Windows Browser Next we add code to Application Startup as in the code below PrivateSub Application Startup ByVal o AsObject ByVal e As StartupEventArgs HandlesMe Startup Me RootVisual New Page Dim doc As HtmlDocument HtmlPage Document doc GetElementById MCText SetProperty disabled False doc GetElementById MCText
62. e requests to the PHP executable that you installed earlier You can see this configuration if you open the fcgiext ini file which is in the following location AWINDIR System32 inetsrv The configuration file contains the following set tings Types php PHP PHP ExePath c php php cgi exe On IIS 7 0 the installer creates a handler mapping that as with IIS 6 0 instructs the Web server to pass all PHP requests to FastCGI You can examine this configuration by opening the Handler Mappings user interface in IIS Manager The installer also configures the FastCGI module to use the PHP executable for processing PHP requests This configuration can be examined in the FastCGI set tings in IIS Manager See Figure 6 FIGURE 3 115 Lacer Go i RUSLANHSERMEA RLUSLANY SERVER Home Web Server Setup Select the Web Server you wish to setup IIS FastCGI Other CGI O Do not setup a web server Cancel I 31 May 2009 www phparch com After the PHP installer completes the setup process you can confirm that PHP is set up successfully To do so create a new text file named phpinfo php in the fol lowing folder SystemDrive inetpub wwwroot Open this file in a text editor and add a line of PHP code that calls the phpinfo function Save the file and then request the following URL in a browser http localhost phpinfo php If PHP is working properly you will see the standard PHP in
63. ely new build system for Windows Most of the project files and the associ ated pain went away The new system is made up of a set of Jscript scripts reproducing the syntax of the m4 configuration file available on the other platforms the config m4 files or the main configure command The new scripts also are easy to extend and maintain PHP 5 3 and its new build scripts brought PHP on Windows to a new level opening the door for many features and extensions available on other platforms to be ported to Windows Where We Stand One of the first tasks was to make sure PHP could be built smoothly with a recent compiler It was virtually impossible to debug PHP on Windows with a 10 year old compiler with much of the source no longer avail able We choose to target Visual Studio 2008 referred to as VC9 in this article Visual Studio 6 VC6 is still sup ported for PHP Builds and the current plan is to pro vide VC6 support for the life of the 5 3 Branch Doing so will allow third parties to migrate to VC9 as well Tt is important to note that the community is planning for any release after 5 3 to be available only as VC9 binaries VC9 is at the writing of this article the latest ver sion of the Microsoft Visual C environment It is available in many different versions Yes MSFT product managers love to confuse you with weird naming but shh don t tell them we said so Any versions of VC9 will be able to compile PHP even the f
64. er getHost Get a reference to the Silverlight Application and assign it to the local JavaScript variable Before we can actually access our scriptable Silverlight object we need to register our pl uginLoaded method via the onLoad param eter to the Silverlight Application s object tag We can just add a parameter line like this param name onLoad value pluginLoaded Now we can set up a textbox that needs our CustomStringFormatter method and a bit of JavaScript to call it First we ll add another textbox and a Button to our HTML and we ll specify a Button Click Event Handler for the Button lt input type text id FormatedText value hello world gt amp nbsp lt input type button id ButtonCustomFormatter value Format Text onclick return ButtonCustomFormatter onclick gt Note the value of the textbox is all lower case All we need to do now is to implement the ButtonCustomFormatter onclick event handler meth od in JavaScript function ButtonCustomFormatter onclick FormatedText value slCtl Content mySLapp Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM FEATURE 9 CustomStringFormatter FormatedText value Now when we run the application and click on the Button we see the text in the textbox change to upper case but the code that actually changes the case of the string is compiled into our Silverlight application In the examples in Figure 6 we ve
65. er give more flexibility over autoloading than we ve had before and also provide autoloading capabilities for resources in application modules This allows for some incredible solutions in regards to lazy loading of resources as well as inter module usage of resources Zend Application will provide a unified bootstrap with support for dif ferent environments think development vs staging vs production as well as re use in testing and service infrastructures I unfortunately cannot speak towards 2 0 right now We re doing a fair bit of planning but right now a lot of it is up in the air including if how we will support PHP 5 3 IVO JANSCH is the CTO of Ibuildings a PHP services company based in Europe He is the author of phplarchitect s Guide to Enterprise PHP Development and is an active blogger and speaker in the PHP community lvo also initiated the ATK Business Framework Garbage Collection by Derick Rethans In this second part of the three part column on the new garbage collecting mechanism in PHP 5 3 we ll dive into a solution to the problem with circular references If we look quickly back we found that by using code like is found in Figure 1 an in request memory leak is created nisms such as that used by PHP fail to address those circular reference memory leaks Back in 2007 while looking into this issue I was pointed to a paper by David F Bacon and V T Rajan titled Concur rent Cycle Col
66. et applications Version 2 0 released October 2008 brings additional interactivity features and support for NET languages and development tools It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems Mobile devices starting with Windows Mobile 6 and Symbian Series 60 phones will also be supported The vector based presentation in a Silverlight control or application is powered by the Extensible Application Markup Language or XAML for short Because XAML is used for visual objects and behav iors in WPF and Silverlight it s often assumed that XAML is a User Interface Definition Language but this is not strictly the case In a more general sense XAML is an XML vocabulary for defining collections of objects These objects can be visual logical or behavioral It just so happens that the first practical applications of XAML are user inter face and UI behavior related To get started building Silverlight applications you ll FIGURE 3 Templates Visual Studia westalled templates S Sivertight Application Silverlight Class Library Templates il Search Online Ternplate A project for creating a Silyverlsght Application which uses Netto provide rich Web experiences NET Franeaecak 3 5 Name Sihverlightapplecationd Location Solution Warme ibverlight amp pplieationl Create directory for solution 24 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Introd
67. formation page Configuring IIS and PHP Now that you have IIS and PHP working together it is time to perform a few configuration steps to ensure that you have an optimal execution environment for PHP applications setting the Default Document e e 9 o 0 0 o o 0 o 0 0 The first configuration task you want to do with PHP on IIS is to set the default document to index php To do that on IIS 5 1 and IIS 6 0 you use the IIS Manager tool On IIS 7 0 you can use the IIS Manager UI Alternatively on IIS 7 0 you can use the appcmd exe command line tool to set up index php as the default document Use the following syntax WINDIR Nsystem32NinetsrvNappcmd exe set config section system webServer defaultDocument files value index php commit apphost FIGURE 5 Add Edit Application Extension Mapping Executable IMNTisvstem3e2linetksrvYFcgiext dll Browse Extension Verbs C Al verbs Limit to GET HEAD POST Script engine V verify that File exists FIGURE 6 af De Dem b Gy Hander Mappings Optimizing PHP On Windows e o O 0 o o o
68. ft Open Source Technology Center where he runs the Open Source Software Lab and Novell Joint Interoperability labs Hank has been working with nix and other OSS for over 20 years He started at AT amp T doing kernel programming for ihe SYS V process scheduler for Digital Telephone switches 5ESS He designed a globally distributed database system using such golden oldies as uucp and rje He was also the lead programmer designer on a Point Of Sale system that did real time cell phone activations for Sprint the first in the US built solely with OSS software Favorite languages remain C C and his favorite editor is still Emacs g Silverlig ht by Joe Stagner This article 1s intended to serve as an introduction to Microsoft Silverlight for developers that are probably not NET developers There is an AMAZING quantity of speculative dialog on the world wide web about what Silverlight is what it s good at or not what it means to developers and designers and especially whether or not it s a Flash Killer Even an introduction to Silverlight would be incomplete without some discussion of WHY Silverlight Is Silverlight a Flash Killer This question presumes that Silverlight and Flash are designed to meet the same set of development needs and I think this assumption 15 an incorrect one Sure they re both RIA technologies whatever that means these days but there is a much broader story to tell when comparing the t
69. hese Frameworks and libraries such as PEAR Zend Framework Solar and others have already poured countless hours into creat ing solutions as well as into testing them thoroughly Why code your own imperfect solution when there s a well tested and community vetted one available That is just one reason to use a framework There are many more so I asked Matthew to give me his top 3 reasons amount of articles in php architect on various e Use a framework in order to make better use of your time code your application not its dependencies 8 May 2009 www phparch com e Use a framework to leverage the knowledge of the masses don t reinvent the wheel e Use a framework to build on a tested foun dation test your business logic not how to fetch results from a database These are very much related yet touch on different as pects of development What Matthew s reasons have in common is that all 3 focus on optimizing development You could sum this up as A framework makes you more efficient Despite the popularity of frameworks there are also people opposed to frameworks One example is Rasmus Lerdorf original author of PHP What the opponents usually say is that PHP itself is already a framework Any framework built on top introduces overhead I asked Matthew what he thought of this Matthew Absolutely there s overhead to using a framework However frameworks offer advantages over vanilla PHP First with a framewo
70. ill return true as long as there s another result to process When there are no more results to process sqlsrv next result returns null Developers who want to suppress the messages that indicate how many rows were affected can use SQL Server s NOCOUNT setting described in more detail in the SQL Server documentation http msdn microsoft com en us library ms189837 aspx Cleaning Up e 6 e 6 6 o e o 06 o 9 9 9 o 9 If a SQL Server Driver for PHP s connection or state ment falls out of scope it will be cleaned up as part of the PHP engine s garbage collection process and the resources associated with the connection or statement will be released at that time Another option is to pro actively release those resources You can free state ments using sqlsrv free stmt and close connections using sqlsrv close 43 May 2009 www phparch com What s In Store For the Next Version of the Extension eo e 9 0 o 9 9 9 0 The SQL Server Driver for PHP team is currently work ing on the next version of the extension The fea ture request we ve received most frequent
71. ilverlight controls and applications are built using NET PHP developers can integrate with Silverlight applications in two ways First the Silverlight runtime includes a com plete networking stack so that your Silverlight applica tion can call your PHP code via REST SOAP or even Sockets As PHP developers we re very familiar with constructing an HTML DOM and delivering JavaScript from our PHP code You can build a Silverlight appli cation in which your entire user interface is a single Silverlight Canvas and the browser basically serves as a delivery mechanism Or you can build a Silverlight application in which one or more Silverlight objects are contained in an HTML page In this scenario one can call compiled code in the Silverlight application from JavaScript code in the containing page It is also possible to call JavaScript code in the containing page from the compiled code in the Silverlight application This is the scenario we ll implement below Visual Web Developer will create the raw Silverlight project as seen in Figure 3 In addition to the Silverlight project files Visual Web Developer will also create test pages in ASP NET and HTML for running our Silverlight application For the purposes of this article we ll ignore the aspx file and work with the html file which best represents the markup we would generate from a PHP application see Figure 4 If you re following along you can delete the de fault aspx and th
72. info 1 This provides PATH INFO PATH TRANSLATED support for CGI The previous behavior tings as always backup before you start lof the PHP CGI module was to set PATH TRANSLATED to SCRIPT FILENAME and Run regedit Start gt Run gt regedit To disable Ito ignore the PATH INFO setting For 2 information about PATH INFO see the CGI the driver navigate to specification Changing this setting to 1 causes the PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the specification HKEY LOCAL MACHINE gt SYSTEM gt CurrentControlSet gt Services gt luafv cgi force_redirect 0 You must turn this off under IIS Left undefined PHP will turn this on by i default IIS takes care of CGI handling Then modify the variable Start to value Hex 4 If you I ete ON EE C Mild extension_dir This setting specifies a location for want to re enable this driver simply set the value to 2 nn NOS RE DEM you use the following values for this setting extension dirz ext or I I I I extension_dir C Program Files PHP ext Running Multiple Versions of PHP Side allow url fopen off These settings disable remote URLs for by Side allow url include off file handling functions This can reduce eo clo 40 eee ee ee ee s ee ee ee ee e
73. ing an auto increment column you ll likely want that new key value In SQL Server the easiest way to return this information is to use the SCOPE IDENTITY function which returns the last auto increment value inserted within the same scope i e the same stored procedure trigger or batch The code in Listing 7 inserts a new row in an Orders table that uses an auto increment column for its pri mary key and then uses the SCOPE IDENTITY function to retrieve the server generated auto increment value Note the call to sqlsrv next result which we ll discuss next prior to fetching the newly generated auto incre ment value For more information on the SCOPE IDENTITY func tion see the entry in SQL Server Books Online http msdn microsoft com en us library ms190315 aspx Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP FEATURE Handling Multiple Results SQL Server allows you to execute multiple queries in a batch The sqlsrv_next_result function allows you to move to the next result within the batch In the previ ous batch query the initial result contains no columns and no rows The result of the INSERT query is simply a message that indicates that the query affected one row the row inserted by the query In order to re trieve the results of the SELECT query we need to call sqlsrv_next_result prior to fetching the new auto increment value If you re processing the results of a batch query the sqlsrv next result function w
74. ing configuration files Apache users should preload all htaccess files and then disable on the fly htaccess parsing This saves a whole lot of file IO on your web server but also requires you to restart your web server whenever you want to implement a change made to an htaccess file In the section of your httpd conf file that defines your site remove any existing AllowOverride statements and add the following AllowOverride None Include YOURSITE htaccess Restart the web server for the change to take effect A complete example can be seen in Listing 2 Error Handling Are PHP error messages being logged but not displayed on the page Is error reporting set at E_ALL or higher level Be sure that in the php ini file of your production server log errors is on display_errors is off and error reporting is set to E ALL or higher ideally E ALL E STRICT This is especially important if your development and production environments are running different versions of PHP or if there are any server related software configurations that are not identical between environments Security Can passwords or back end source code be accessed by simply navigating to a URL Some common examples to check are e http YOURSITE com svn e http YOURSITE com htpasswd e http YOURSITE com config inc SSL If Needed Did you install the SSL certificate Can you access your site via both http and https without receiving 48 M
75. ing top of the line web applications security audits and systems scaling The rest of his time is taken up by his passion for all things PEAR Helgi is a long term contributor with a wide range of PEAR packages behind him and also takes care of the PEAR website He is currently an elected member of the governing body PEAR Group Helgi enjoys writing articles speaking at conferences and working on PEAR2 and Pyrus COLUMN ENTERPRISE PHP The Rise of Frameworks by lvo Jansch Frameworks are more popular than ever and seem to have replaced the CMS as the implementation of choice for websites In this article Ivo interviews Matthew Weier O Phinney software architect for Zend Framework on several topics such as the reasons why frameworks are so popular frameworks has increased significantly over the past year This reflects the general popularity of frameworks To analyze this trend I have interviewed Matthew Weier O Phinney the software architect for Zend Framework one of the frameworks that has grown in popularity tremendously Although Matthew is natu rally biased towards Zend Framework we had a very open discussion on frameworks in general First I asked Matthew his opinion on what drives peo ple to use frameworks Matthew I think there s grow ing recognition that many PHP development problems already have solutions and that it s a waste of devel oper time to code new solutions for t
76. ke advantage of recent key features of the Microsoft enable Full Text Search service in order to SQL Server engine from within their PHP applications install AdventureWorks examples The SQL Server Driver for PHP supports all editions of e Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP http both SQL Server 2005 and 2008 from Express to En o microsoft com fwlink LinkId 123470 terprise including support for all new SQL Server 2008 e Microsoft SQL Server Native Client ODBC Driver data types All of the basic functionality expected of htt www microsoft com downloads details a database extension connect query retrieve results 1 10 50097994 8453 4998 8226 fa42ec403d17 amp displaylang en transactions is supported by the extension as well as e E batte Alec features that developers working with sat server have msftdbprodsamples codeplex com Release come to expect such as connection pooling integrated ProjectReleases aspx ReleaseId 18407 authentication and encrypted connections Microsoft has made the source code for the SQL Supported Windows 0S Server Driver for PHP publicly available on the Microsoft 1 Windows 2000 Sence Codeplex site http www codeplex com SQL2K5PHP e Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 e Windows Server 2008 Installing the SQL Server Driver for PHP Windows Small Business Server 2003 The SQL Server Driver for PHP is available on the Microsoft Download Center The extension was prima
77. le on optimizing PHP on Windows to gain some speed David Sceppa s article introduces you to the SQL Server Driver for PHP and Joe Stagner walks you through adding the power of Silverlight to your PHP apps If you ve got a site going live you ll want to check out Eric David Benari s pre launch checklist to make sure it s really ready Is your site or project still in the planning stages Be sure to take a look at Arne Blankerts column on the cost of security and Helgi ormar orbjrnsson s column on quality assurance teams both essentials items to discuss when planning a new project Ivo Jansch interviews Matthew Weier O Phinney to find out why frameworks are so popular and if you can t get enough of frameworks stay tuned next month for our frameworks superis sue Derick Rethans walks us through part 2 of his column on PHP s gar bage collection mechanism and Marco Tabini wraps things up for us with a discussion on the loss of simplicity and creativity in web design Ej May 2009 Volume 8 Issue 5 Publisher Arbi Arzoumani Editor in Chief Elizabeth Tucker Long Author Liaison Elizabeth Naramore Cathleen MacIsaac Technical Editors Simon Harris Ian Lessing Clark Everetts Graphics amp Layout Arbi Arzoumani Managing Editor Arbi Arzoumani Authors Eric David Benari Arne Blankerts Nik Garkusha Ivo Jansch Hank Janssen Pierre Jove Helgi Pormar Porbjornsson Derick Rethans David Sceppa Joe Stagner Marco Tabini
78. lection in Reference Counted Systems see Related Links Although the paper was written with Java in mind I started to play around with it to see if it was feasible to implement the synchronous algorithm as outlined in the paper in PHP At that moment I didn t have a lot of time but along came the Google Summer of Code see Related Links and we put forward the implementation of this paper as one of our ideas Yiduo David Wang picked up this idea and started hacking on the first version as part of the Sum mer of Code project A full explanation of how the algorithm works would be slightly beyond the scope of this column but I will try to explain the basics First of all we have to estab lish a few ground rules If a refcount is increased it s still in use and therefore not garbage If the refcount is decreased and hits zero the zval can be freed This means that garbage cycles can only be created when a refcount argument is decreased to a non zero value To reference counting memory mecha 11 May 2009 www phparch com COLUMN Secondly in a garbage cycle it is possible to discover which parts are garbage by checking whether it is possible to decrease their refcount by one and then checking which of the zvals have a refcount of zero To avoid having to call the checking of garbage cycles with every possible decrease of a refcount the algorithm instead puts all possible roots zvals in the root buffer marking the
79. loying just to name a few One important purpose of QA teams is to think up new ways to make it easier for developers to adhere to the standards to make it really easy for end users to report issues and to find information they need to 6 May 2009 www phparch com reduce duplicate reports or invalid ones To create a better end user experience usually requires the QA team to bother the developers to write proper API documen tation and harass the documentation team to produce a proper user manual In many projects the QA team will also deal with the tests Writing user stories based on the specifications if they are so lucky to have such a thing so that the developers can write accurate func tional and unit tests This will also allow the QA team to do proper verifications before releases and sprint closures QA teams are an impartial third party they have an outside perspective on the application The problem with developers is that they don t make good users due to how close they are to the product They know what can be done and what can t be done and are thus less likely to be as creative as end users when it comes to using testing the product QA is the bridge between the two QA will point out things that work but are not as clear or obvious as they could be e g obscure error messages unintuitive interface be it user interface or API design or finding fragile code where something is a little off and ends up blowing up in
80. ly via blogs forums etc is to add UTF 8 support to the extension We re in the process of adding that functionality along with support for scrollable resultsets and row count Naturally we ll also make sure the driver runs well on PHP 5 3 To keep up with the latest announcements about the extension you can access the SQL Server Driver for PHP team s blog at http blogs msdn com sqlphp Is the Documentation Available Online e e 9 0 o 0 o o o 0 The download for the SQL Server Driver for PHP includes a chm file so you can access the driver s documen tation locally but you can also access the driver s documentation online at http go microsoft com fwlink linkid 119889 Where Do Go to Ask Questions e e 0 o 0 0 Members of the SQL Server Driver for PHP team and many members of the PHP community answer questions on the MSDN forum for the extension We welcome your feedback and questions on how to use the current ver sion of the extension as well as your input on how we can improve on it going forward PHP developers who
81. m purple It also makes sure that each possible garbage root ends up in the buffer only once Only when the root buffer is full does the collection mechanism start for all the different zvals inside Figure 2 shows this in step A In step B the algorithm runs a depth first search on all possible roots to decrease by one the refcounts of each zval it finds making sure not to decrease a refcount on the same zval twice by marking them as grey In step C the algorithm again runs a depth first search from each root node to check the refcount of each zval again If it finds that the refcount is zero the zval is marked white blue in the figure If it s larger than zero it reverts the decreasing of the ref count by one with a depth first search from that point on and they are marked black again In the last step D the algorithm walks over the root buffer removing the zval roots from there and meanwhile checks which zvals have been marked white in the previous step Every zval marked as white will be freed Now that you have a basic understanding of how the algorithm works we will look back at how this inte grates with PHP By default PHP s garbage collector is turned on There is however a php ini setting that allows you to change this zend enable gc When the garbage collector is turned on the cycle finding algorithm as described above is executed whenever the root buffer runs full The root buffer has a fixed siz
82. n create a shortcut to the file in your Windows startup folder The folder location var ies with Windows versions but the path is not really needed you can just double click the Startup folder in the Start Menu to open the folder MySQL users can also create tables using the memory engine which stores the data in RAM This is ideal for data that rarely changes such as a lookup table that indexes country codes Just like with the RAM disk the data in a memory table will be lost upon reboot so you need to create a SQL script to repopulate your memory tables from disk based tables insert into countries memory select from countries innodb You can then set the file to execute automatically on reboot by adding the init file directive to your my ini file or my cnf on nix While you are editing the MySQL configuration you should also be sure that query cache is enabled and that the cache memory lim its are set appropriately for your hardware the default settings were created many years ago and do not take advantage of modern computing power For all dynamic data that is suitable for cach ing both file based data and database queries use FEATURE FEATURE memcached or another caching package With memcached you gain the additional benefit of being able to store your PHP session data in memcached as opposed to in files the default or in the database an option best avoided Preload Configuration Files Are you preload
83. naries e include contains all headers file h hpp etc e lib contains all development libraries used to link with php This directory is automatically detected by configure and is treated as the default location for the files of each library All libraries are available online and can be down loaded for each compiler and architecture combination The base URL for the downloads is http pecl2 php net downloads php windows builds php libs Since the same directory structure is used as in our PHP SDK directories it is very easy to find the one you need Our current configuration being VC9 and x86 you can find all libraries at http pecl12 php net downloads php windows builds php libs VC9 x86 Each of the library archives contains the bin include and lib directories To add a library to your develop ment all you have to do is copy the archive contents bin include and lib to the deps directory For example let us try to enable the hot new intl extension a cool new extension providing I18N and some unicode features to php 5 3 First you have to know which libraries are required by the intl extension You can do this by checking the ever useful Wiki It has a list of all extensions and their dependencies including the version info See http wiki php net internals windows libs extensions _ and their libraries As you can see the intl extension depends on the ICU library The version used by PHP 5 3 on VC9 x86 i
84. nces this month especially at php tek I wish I could be there Conferences are a great place to not only sample new technologies and methods but also to meet your fellow developers Too often programmers work in a vacuum learning new things from books or online documentation by them selves Don t get me wrong this kind of self reliance is a great skill but T have to admit I love to see programmers hanging out together at confer ences getting to know new people and discussing solutions to problems they ve faced So do me a favor get out and meet some people this month Not sure where to do it I highly recommend php tek May 19 22 2009 http tek mtacon com if you can swing it Need something local Check out our directory of user groups in this issue Your user group not listed Send an e mail to beth phparch com and let me know the details so we can include it in our directory This month we re focusing on using PHP on Windows Now in the past the PHP Windows relationship has gotten a bad rap but thanks to a col laboration between the PHP Community and Microsoft in the form of the PHP Windows Team this relationship has really taken off and we hope that we can bring to light some of the great new tools and features available to PHP programmers To get you started Hank Janssen and Pierre A Joye walk you through installing PHP on Windows Once you ve completed installation check out Ruslan Yakushev and Hank Janssen s artic
85. nd OSX on hand and Safari Internet Explorer and Firefox on the other that are completely at odds with each other Worse than that web development itself is performed with a purpose that is at odds with the very basic premise under which the Web was invented HTML is clearly a data description language but de velopers were using it for layout because that s what users wanted from it so CSS was invented Now I have been in the publishing industry for at least ten years and I freely admit that CSS is a complete mystery to have learned to use it and understand its quirks but frankly I have always found its design principles mind boggling Then of course we have to worry about the fact that really HTML and CSS don t exist because each a friend who works with embedded systems 50 May 2009 www phparch com browser vendor has decided in their infinite wisdom that a common set of functionality would be inappro priate Unfortunately there are compelling arguments for supporting all three browsers which adds to the overall heartburn to which web designers are subject I could go on of course don t even get me started on the server side but the bottom line is that web development is very much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole only to find out that the square peg has sympathetic high explosive charges wired to every side and the round hole is really just a black circle painted on concrete flo
86. ndards play a role if the project does not have well developed standards often the third party code will be difficult to evaluate and you can end up with wide variations in code quality So look for a combination of good standards and good community When you look at community don t just consider the size of the community but the quality of the commu nity Some projects I ve looked at do not have a huge following but the community surrounding them is very knowledgeable and helpful which makes the frame work a pleasure to use Solar specifically comes to mind here These are all useful criteria when selecting a frame work but what I like most are Matthew s last words on this question Frameworks are like clothes every body has preferences on what they like to wear what looks good and how to put them together What s most important is choosing the right clothes for the right situation or the right framework for the right job Carefully consider your needs your organization s needs and the application needs to make sure you get the right fit Matthew mentioned communities and their impor tance and that users of frameworks are just as impor tant to that community If you use a framework con sider contributing back A framework is only as good as the contributions it receives If you encounter bugs write test cases and patches If you code new features 10 May 2009 www phparch com The Rise of Frameworks co
87. nstead of the SDK one set PATH C php sdk phparch53 vc9 x86 deps bin PATHS and now call again Debug TS php exe dextension dir Debug ts dextension php intl dll m Et voila you can now begin to test your freshly built PHP and even add any other extension you may need Debugging PHP the Easy Way e 9 6 06 0 o o 0 9 9 9 There is no fun without bugs right Bugs are part of a developer s life just like Monday mornings As we all know PHP has no known bugs so we have to create one for our little exercise Open the file C php sdkphparch53vc9x86php5extsta ndardinfo c and add the code in Listing 2 inside the phpinfo function line 1205 Run nmake again and call php using Debug TS php exe r phpinfo 19 May 2009 www phparch com Installing PHP on Windows FEATURE As to be expected it crashed and Windows is asking you how you would like to proceed as seen in Figure 8 If you are a lucky user of Visual Studio Standard Pro or Team edition you can skip the following steps as these versions support a just in time debug ger You do not need to attach the debugger to the crashed process If you use Visual Studio Express the attach process procedure described below is a neces sary step Do not click any button in th
88. ntribute them back so others may benefit This helps the entire ecosystem and prevents others from need less coding And if you ask questions in the public forum mailing lists irc etc answer at least as many once you have some experience The final topic we discussed was the rise of frame works and the demise of the CMS 3 years ago ev erybody was using one of the popular CMS solutions nowadays frameworks have taken their place as the preferred choice for building sites and applications I asked Matthew A CMS or a framework Matthew A framework hands down CMS solutions quite hon estly all suck CMS solutions do not take into account the varying needs of the organizations utilizing them Frameworks on the other hand allow you to code very specific solutions for your CMS needs Ultimately a CMS should allow you to build out functionality as needed complete with administration interfaces and custom front ends with a minimum of effort Frameworks typi cally provide both whereas off the shelf CMS solutions make custom functionality and output very difficult to achieve I concluded the interview by seizing the opportunity to ask Matthew about cool new features he is plan ning for Zend Framework Matthew Features in ZF 1 8 that will be cool We re moving towards an autoload ing solution but have to gradually move there due to backward compatibility issues Zend Loader Autoloader and Zend Application Module Autoload
89. o actually fix the problem This is all highly inef ficient but still displays an effort to maintain a certain amount of quality QA and PEAR A good 5 years ago the PEAR QA efforts fell into the category It is around even when you think it isn t The project had a QA mailing list where there were some people around that did the occasional poking about and kept the project in decent shape Quality was by no means bad but as the project grew in size the demand on high quality code rose and since PEAR had some standards in place already it became evident A QA team would have to be formed to take on this chal lenge in a more official and more efficient way With that in mind an RFC was written by Lukas Smith and yours truly http pear php net pepr pepr proposal show php id 6 on various things in regards to operating the PEAR QA team The RFC was accepted and became the QA team s modus operandi which still holds true to this day Sadly as is often the case with open source projects and indeed even companies resources and man power are scarce and as such a QA team might not be in 7 May 2009 www phparch com PEAR Corner COLUMN place from day one or it s Just too overwhelming for the team at hand and things start piling up which was the case for PEAR Bug reports as old as 6 or 7 years were still open and unattended something not acceptable by a project claiming high standards and so last year 2008 after b
90. ompiler and the Windows Platform SDK is nec essary to build PHP PHP can be compiled with VC6 or VC9 other version are known to work but are not officially supported but we will focus on VC9 only in this article A list of all compilers and their respective Platform SDK can be found on our wiki see http wiki php net internals windows compiler and http wiki php net internals windows windowssdk As a result of the ongoing work the community can FIGURE 2 i Microsoft Windows SOK for Wandews Server 2008 and Framewerk 35 ne SL Installation Options AS Software f Development Kit gt F1 Documentation z HET Framework 7 Wind and COM a Feature Des etal To customize installation click an option Win32z amp EI 2 Z Framework Samples in Documentation i2 Sanaphes in fies 15 May 2009 www phparch com now support a wider range of Windows versions even the latest new releases like the Windows 7 beta Officially supported e Windows 2008 32bit e Windows Vista 32bit e Windows 2003 32bit e Windows 2000 32bit e Windows XP SP2 3 32bit Experimental e Windows 2003 64bit e Windows 2008 64bit e Windows Vista 64bit e Windows 7 32 or 64bit Please note that Windows 64bit can run 32bit binaries without any problems So now enough of the boring background Let s actu ally build PHP on Windows Setting Up Your Environment
91. on for a high security hosting facility depends on the liability defined in the contracts and possible amounts of money in compensa tions to be paid in case anything goes wrong Housing the static company homepage may have different requirements than a credit card processing service A fake news announcement placed by an attacker on the company website bears different risks as well For the homepage of the bakery down the street a faked news announcement may only be a small annoyance For a stock based company a proclamation of bankruptcy could become a self fulfilling prophecy The only way to reliably determine if when and where to raise the levels of security is by answering some what if questions What can happen what dam age will it cause and how much money is needed to protected against it When creating this list you will realize some security problems are vital to fix while others though annoying don t cause enough harm to be worked on as scary as that may sound While mak ing such a list is not hard per se it requires knowl edge about what is possible and how to calculate your risk Knowledge which could be gained by training and learning but that would require spending money on security to begin with ARNE BLANKERTS is the head of development at NonFood advertising agency in Hamburg Germany Arne is the inventor and lead developer of an open source site system CMS http fcms de that is written in object oriented
92. on with SP1 Install in folder C Program Files x86 Microsoft Visual Studio 9 01 The following items will be downloaded and installed Visual C Runtime Pre requisites Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger Light x64 Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Headers and Libraries x64 Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Express Tools for NET Framework x64 enu Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 5 1 Express Tools for Win 32 Disk space requirements C 607 MB Total download size 96 MB Connect to the Internet before proceeding with the installation lt Previous Install gt Cancel 14 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Installing PHP on Windows build PHP VC 6 the compiler that came with Visual Studio 1998 a 10 year old compiler for which you could no long buy licenses and which was no longer supported by Microsoft PHP on Windows was slowly dying due to lack of support and community members interested enough to want to work on these issues This situation persisted until the PHP 5 2 6 release time April May 2008 but with an ever increasing in terest in Windows as a platform for PHP deployments it had to change In April 2008 the PHP community with the help of Microsoft s Open Source Center decided to drastically improve this situation and the PHP Windows Team was born Work began on improving the next PHP 5 3 on Windows PHP 5 3 introduced a complet
93. onstrates how to call that function and specify an output parameter The query string uses the canonical CALL syntax where CALL precedes the stored procedure name parameter markers are enclosed in parenthesis and the entire query string is enclosed in curly braces Using Prepared Queries e 6 6 0 o o o 9 0 9 6 In all of the query examples we ve examined so far we ve called the sqlsrv query function The SQL Server Driver for PHP also supports the commonly used prepare execute model which can improve performance in scenarios where you want to execute the same query multiple times and change only the parameter values used You can call sqlsrv prepare using the same argu ments as sqlsrv query and the SQL Server Driver for PHP will prepare the query for execution You can later call sqlsrv execute to execute the query You can also modify the contents of your parameter variables be tween calls to sqlsrv execute and the SQL Server Driver for PHP will pass the new values to the database each 41 May 2009 www phparch com time Listing 5 demonstrates this approach Updating Data e e 6 e 6 6 oe oe 6 e e 6 e o o
94. org PDXPHP Portland OR USA http www pdxphp org DallasPHP Plano TX USA http www DallasPHP org In this example the PHP setting open basedir is used to distinguish between process pool definitions In addition the setting enforces that the PHP execut able for each process pool can perform file operations only within the root folder of the corresponding Web site After creating the process pools you can use the following command to create a handler mapping for website1 com and website2 com appemd exe set config websiteN com section system webServer handlers name PHP via FastCGI path C php php cgi exe d open_basedir C inetpub websiteN com modules FastCgiModule e e To tell the PHP process where to find the php ini file you can use the PHPRC environment variable If the PHP process finds a php ini file in the path specified in this environment variable the process will use that path Otherwise the process reverts to looking in the default location for the php ini file Imagine that you have two Web sites in IIS 7 0 website1 com and website2 com and you want each Web site to use its own version of the php ini file Assume that the php ini file for website1 com is located in
95. oring This is worrisome for a number of reasons First it stifles creativity budgets are a finite resource and the more money spent on making sure that a web appli cation runs on as many platforms as possible is money that is not spent on coming up with new ideas and products Second we just keep building hacks on top of other hacks and that spells trouble for the long term stability and viability of applications What s the solution It s hard to tell Vendors seem to be clear on the fact that interoperability beyond the most basic of levels is really of no major concern to them Ultimately this could simply give rise to a sort of super platform that makes it possible for devel opers to completely bypass HTML and company and finally write code once that will run anywhere Some companies like Adobe with Flex and Microsoft with SilverLight are obviously after this very solution but they have also run into a number of problems like con siderable inertia in consumer adoption limited func tionality paranoia induced security restrictions and so forth Ultimately the great risk that we re all running is that the true cost of developing for the web which is already fairly high today will reach a point where investment capital will simply shift elsewhere ElePHPonis The elePHPants love to travel the world Here are some photos that they have sent us from their travels Move over Waldo Where s Elephpant Photo Rumble in
96. possible to run PHP on Windows 29 May 2009 www phparch com Related URLs PHP Any Other Software e Windows XP SP2 or later vista 2000 server 2003 2008 or win7 e Microsoft IIS Web server Useful Related Links e PHP for Windows site htt e PHP for Windows downloads htt Official IIS FastCGI Site e IIS Administration Pack htt Support Section e IRC Channel Freenode php dev win e Windows Internals mailing list htt has been provided for IIS 5 1 and IIS 6 0 FastCGI ad dresses the performance issues inherent in CGI by pro viding a mechanism to reuse a single process for many requests Additionally FastCGI maintains compatibility with non thread safe libraries by providing a pool of reusable processes and ensuring that each process will handle only one request at a time Enabling FastCGI Support in 115 The process for enabling FastCGI in IIS depends on what version of Windows you have In Windows XP with IIS 5 1 and in Windows Server with IIS 6 0 FastCGI support is provided via a FastCGI extension which can be downloaded from the official IIS site IIS 7 0 in Windows Vista Service Pack and in Windows Server 2008 has a built in FastCGI module that you simply enable and configure Installing the FastCGI Extension for 115 5 1 and 6 0 6 e
97. procedures in the following sec input nesting levels 64 tions For example assume that on your Web server Jon display_errors 0ff These settings configure error messages plan to support PHP 4 4 8 PHP 5 2 1 and the non log_errors 0n logging error_log path thread safe version of PHP 5 2 5 In addition you have JJ i i fastcgi logging 0 A PHP request to the IIS FastCGI module three Web sites and each site needs to use a differ will fail if any data is sent on stderr by using the FastCGI protocol Disabling ent version of PHP To enable this configuration you ing error information over stderr which must place PHP binaries in separate folders on the file me system for example on C php448 C php521 and REPRE p E ST C php525nts and then configure FastCGI by follow expose_php 0ff This setting hides the presence of PHP Tecoma ing the configuration steps that are specific to the IIS 33 May 2009 www phparch com create process pool definitions that use different ver sions of the PHP executables Use the following syntax making sure you substitute the correct site address and site ID for siteN com and siteN id respectively cscript fcgiconfig js add section PHP siteN com extension php path C php448 php e
98. provide an updated ODBC driver for each release of SQL Server including service 38 May 2009 www phparch com PHP is built on top of the ODBC driver written for SQL Server 2005 the SQL Server Driver for PHP supports SQL Server 2008 as well including all new SQL Server 2008 data types Microsoft also recently demonstrated its continued commitment to ODBC through the introduction of a new version of ODBC 3 8 with the recent Windows 7 beta For developers building new applications in C or C ODBC is still the most powerful stable and best per forming technology for communicating with SQL Server In short building the SQL Server Driver for PHP on top of the ODBC driver gives PHP developers a highly performant solution for SQL Server connectivity for both current and future versions of SQL Server Connecting to Your SQL Server Database e e e e 0 o 6 0 o 0 0 Connecting to your SQL Server Database using the SQL Server Driver for PHP is easy To open a connection simply call the sqlsrv connect function and specify the name of the desired server An instance name ServerName InstanceName can be supplied if you re trying to connect to a named instance of SQL Server If you want to talk to an instance of SQL Server running on the same machine
99. r ily tested against version 5 2 6 of the PHP engine but should work against all 5 2 x versions starting with e Windows Vista Service Pack 1 e Windows XP Service Pack 2 37 May 2009 www phparch com 5 2 4 We are working with the community to make sure the extension also works well in 5 3 x environments To install the driver download the driver package from the Microsoft Download Center http go microsoft com fwlink LinkId 123470 and run the self extracting exe The self extracting exe contains two dll files php sqlsrv dll non thread safe and php sqlsrv ts dll thread safe Place the appropriate dll file in the PHP extension directory such as C PHP ext Developers FEATURE Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP packs which ensures that the SQL Server Driver for PHP will be able to provide support for future SQL Server re leases without requiring major re writes to the driver s code This approach allows the SQL Server Driver for PHP to leverage existing features in the current ODBC driver such as connection pooling and easily make fu ture SQL Server features such as new data types avail able to the PHP community in a timely fashion While the initial release of the SQL Server Driver for The SQL Server Driver for PHP supports all editions of both SQL Server 2005 and 2008 from Express to Enterprise including support for all new SQL Server 2008 data types working with a non thread safe
100. rainstorming we decided to attempt a bug triage bi monthly in the spirit of the Mozilla run bug days where end users and developers come together on a specific day and go through old bugs or a specific portion of the system s decided upon in advance verify reports write test cases and fix code I ran the first couple myself with a small group of people attending Finding myself lacking time Daniel O Conner stepped up to take over my role and he has done it so well that PEAR has never before been in such a good state quality wise This is just one example of how an active QA team can make a difference for a project another excellent example would be the Test Fest the PHP team put to gether for 2008 which was all about involving the user groups and communities to help write new test cases and get the coverage up for PHP itself As a result of Test Fest PHP received over 158 new tests a truly great effort to combine test writing and community involvement It went so well that it will be repeated this year See Zoe Slattery s article in the March 2009 issue of php architect The moral of the story is this A QA team can bring a lot to your project and is an important part of the development process Do not only think about deliver ing quickly think about quality for the sake of your end Users On day to day basis HELGI PORMAR PORBJORNSSON works for a new and upcoming startup echolibre that specializes in building APIs creat
101. ree as in beer Visual C Express You can download that version at http www microsoft com express download Installing PHP on Windows FEATURE Another very nice side effect of all this work is that the community now has both 32 bit and 64 bit ver sions of PHP on Windows with VC9 Using VC9 gives us a much improved compiler over VC6 and it will allow us to now further optimize the core PHP system For example the bench php script available in the PHP sources in Zend bench php takes 7 65 seconds to be executed using a VC6 build while it takes only 4 34 sec onds using a VC9 build A 40 performance improve ment Not bad for just replacing the compiler The second task which is still ongoing concerns the PHP libraries used by PHP and its extensions 80 of the dependencies are now traceable documented and ported to Windows for both VC6 and VC9 A complete list is available on the PHP community wiki as well as the procedure to compile each of them See http wiki php net internals windows libs This list in cludes each PHP versions specific details and is kept updated with what we actually use on the official PHP build machines releases or snapshots While in the process of cleaning up the PHP source code from all Windows specific hacks and patches we have succeeded in dropping all dependencies for the core PHP language It means that it is now possible to compile PHP without having to fetch external libraries only a c
102. riety of channels as well Ibuildings OmniTI Zend Blue Parabola and countless others and the ZCE certification as well I think enterprise organizations like to have something to point at how ever and frameworks are currently it Zend Framework receives a lot of buzz in the enterprise circles in large part due to having the Zend brand Enterprises like terms such as quick time to market that s something many frameworks bring Maybe that s why they are so fond of them Matthew continues I don t think it s the only shot for PHP in the enterprise Right frameworks bring RAD to PHP but really that s been pos sible for some time RAD is one thing ease of deployment and maintenance is another PHP s success is its very own design and I think that s something that the enterprise market is begin ning to better understand and appreciate When RAD came up I asked Matthew whether we re going to see RAD support for Zend Framework in IDE s such as wizards to generate controllers Matthew Yes By the time people read this article we will have released ZF 1 8 which introduces Zend Tool Zend Tool includes support for generating project in frastructure as well as code generation for a number of different ZF class types including controllers views helpers etc Given the amount of good frameworks I asked Matthew to temporarily set aside his bias towards Zend Framework and asked what is the important selection
103. rk you will often get a more con sistent API than PHP offers If you ve ever had trouble remembering needle haystack arguments for PHP func tions you ll understand the benefit of this Second frameworks are generally written for re use Most frameworks utilize 00P principles which means that you can extend a class and override or customize specific functionality This is simply not possible when using PHP functions directly Third a good framework will also provide best practices how to name classes methods variables files etc This kind of consistency makes long term maintenance of a code base much simpler Another reason I hear for not using a framework is security if someone discovers a security hole in the framework anybody can hack my site Matthew This is true to an extent but not entirely Most frameworks have mechanisms for dealing with security issues but ultimately it s the developer s responsibility to code with security in mind That said I don t know of any mainstream framework that won t immediately issue a security patch release as soon as they are notified of a security hole The thing is PHP itself occasionally has security holes reported say that you are no more and no less secure using a framework than using PHP itself The next topic we discussed was off the shelf frame works versus home grown frameworks When I ask audiences at conferences what frameworks they use I usually get a rem
104. rticle You can now open the Windows SDK Shell We will target Windows XP 32bit as the version for our bina ries To set the correct environment for this platform enter the following command in the freshly opened shell setenv x86 xp debug We are also choosing to turn on the debug mode We will need it later to debug PHP or its extensions Now go to the php sdk cd c php sdk The first thing to do is to set the various PHP SDK path by running bin phpsdk_setvars bat Now all PHP SDK scripts and commands can be found in your path You have to run this command after every call of the setenv command setenv overrides the PATH environment variable To avoid confusion and prob lems due to incompatible binaries the various Visual C runtime CRT are not compatible with each other we defined a well separated directory structure Each compiler version and architecture for example VC9 and x64 has its own directory It may sound like overkill if you use only one compiler but doing so will also ease the debugging process Having a standard directory structure is a great help during problem hunting via our mailing list or on IRC see the Support Section There is a command in the PHP SDK to create such a struc ture It simply takes the name of the top directory the branch name for example We named ours phparch53 phpsdk buildtree phparch53 You should see the struc ture in Figure 4 Now you can fetch the PHP 5 3 sources The PHP Window
105. run configure help Finally you can configure php The options used here will let you compile a tiny php Press Retry to debug the application Abort Retry Ignore configure disable all enable cli enable debug This command tells the configure script to disable ev erything possible except the CLI sapi using the debug uds mode A summary table lists all enabled extensions as well as the options for the current build thread safety EUER debug release mode etc see Listing 1 Now you can x compile PHP using nmake You should see this on success if it fails at this me CAphp idtiphparchi foc Tabsiphps point you probably have a configuration problem Microsoft R Windows R Resource Compiler Version 17 May 2009 www phparch com Q php sdk phparch53 vc9 x86 php5 gt configure bat disable all enable cli enable debug with sqlite3 enable pdo with pdo mysql with pdo sqlite enable json This will show Enabled extensions Extension Mode Extension Mode date static pdo sqlite static ereg static reflection static json static spl static pere static sqlite3 static pdo static standard static pdo mysql static There is also a mode to tell the configure script to en able everything it has This mode is called the snapshot build configure bat enable sn
106. s 3 8 1 it could be another minor version like 3 8 2 by the time this article is published Download the cor responding zip archive and extract its content to the deps directory Go back to the SDK shell and execute config This command calls the configure script using the same options as in the last configure call configure bat enable snapshot build enable debug You should see the intl extension in the summary table Enabled extensions Extension Mode bcmath static hash static intl shared json static tokenizer static Run nmake to compile a new PHP Now let s see if our new shared extension can be loaded Debug TS php exe dextension dir Debug ts dextension php intl dll m And it fails miserably with a nice dialog see Figure 7 and the following message PHP Warning PHP Startup Unable to load dynamic library Debug ts php intl dll The specified module could not be found in Unknown on line 0 What went wrong The ICU libraries are DLLs and are not statically linked like being entirely copied into the intl exten sion to PHP or to intl They remain separate and have to be placed in a directory where the system can find them In our case they can be found in the deps direc tory in bin To fix this error you simply need to add this bin directory to the PATH environment variable first in the list to be sure that a system version cannot be used i
107. s run our in house developed PHP MySQL server control panel INTERWORX CP Rigorous spam virus filtering Detailed website usage stats including realtime metrics Superb file management WYSIWYG HTML editor INTERWORX CP is also available for your dedicated server Just visit http interworx info for more information and to place your order NEXCESS NET Internet Solutions 304 1 2 S State St Ann Arbor MI 48104 2445 http nexcess net EMO To 65 p M NR ea 4 px 4 SPECIALISTS PHP4 amp MySQL 3 x 4 0 x options also available A lusQqL 128 BIT SSL CERTIFICATES AS LOW AS 39 95 YEAR DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION FROM 10 00 YEAR GENEROUS AFFILIATE PROGRAM UP TO 100 PAYBACK PER REFERRAL 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE FREE DOMAIN NAME WITH ANY ANNUAL SIGNUP
108. s site provides hourly snapshots of the PHP 5 3 sources They can be fetched on the snapshots page http windows php net snapshots Alternatively you can use CVS to fetch the latest version of PHP 5 3 For completeness and as you will surely need CVS later CVS will be used here Open a file explorer Windows key E and go FIGURE 6 Module Revision Options Branch or tag Use HEAD branch Choose branch or tag Branch or tag name PHP 5 3 v Update list Scan subfolders Installing PHP on Windows FEATURE 6 0 5724 0 Copyright C Microsoft Corporation All rights reserved SAPI sapi cli build complete to c php sdkphparch53vc9x86 Right click on the x86 folder and select the CVS Checkout com mand You should see the dialog shown in Figure To verify the build you can list the PHP extensions 5 Copy the following line in the CVSROOT field available pserver cvsread cvs php net repository then enter php5 in the module field bottom right of the window I Wo ACN G i m Next click on the Revision tab and enter PHP 5 3 in the Branch or tag name Figure 6 Modules Core php5 is a module alias for all PHP 5 x branches Once date you feel comfortable enough you may want to play with php6 PHP_5 3 is the name of the PHP 5 3 develop eem ment branch For PHP 6 you can leave this field blank standard it is commonly called HEAD Zend Modules
109. scope When you attempt to connect to SQL Server the driver first checks for any pooled connections that have matching location database and credential information If a matching pooled connection is found that connection is re used Otherwise a new connection is established The first time a connection is used once it s been retrieved from the pool the connection is reset prior to any activity on the connection Resetting the connection ensures that temporary resources such as temporary tables or stored procedures or queries that alter the connec tion s context such as changing databases using the USE statement do not cause unintended effects For more information on connection options includ ing the ones mentioned earlier and other handy fea tures like encrypted connections see the documen tation for the sqlsrv_connect function http msdn microsoft com en us library cc296161 SQL 90 aspx Checking for Errors e e e 9 9 9 If a connection attempt fails the sqlsrv connect func tion returns false You can then use the sqlsrv errors function to retrieve error information on the last opera tion performed by the driver The sqlsrv errors func tion returns an array of arrays where the inner array 39 May 200
110. server ex tension At this point the FastCGI support is enabled in IIS but there is no FastCGI executable yet config ured to work with IIS via FastCGI protocol The sec tion Installing PHP later in this document describes how to configure IIS to process PHP requests by using FastCGI Enabling FastCGI in IIS 7 0 e e 0 0 o o 0 o 0 6 6 To enable FastCGI in IIS 7 0 on Windows Vista the first thing you need to do is install SP1 SP1 provides FastCGI to IIS on Windows Vista Add the CGI fea ture in the Windows Control Panel Control Panel gt Programs and Features Turn Windows features on or off as shown in Figure 1 This enables both the CGI and FastCGI services On Windows Server 2008 add the CGI role service by using the Server Manager Server Manager gt Roles gt Add Role Services as shown in Figure 2 This enables both the CGI and FastCGI services You can configure settings for the FastCGI module in IIS 7 0 by using command line tools or by manually editing the IIS configuration files If you prefer to use a GUI for editing the FastCGI configuration you can install ITS Administration Pack see Related URLs For both Server 2008 and Windows Vista you enable CGI This in effect enables the FastCGI capability used by PHP Th
111. sn t necessarily rule out re using existing code from other projects Many developers say they write their own frameworks because they learn so much Is that a good reason Yes it s a great way to learn The thing to be aware of however is that others have done it before It s often just as good of a learning experience to sit down and browse through a framework s classes and see how it all works together But for those who are more hands on types I highly recommend the code your own ap proach Just be willing to let go of your ego and adopt something else later And if you re doing it on company time just go and learn one or more frameworks instead be aware that if you write your own it will need to be maintained later as well Next we went on discussing if the popularity of frameworks helps strengthen PHP s position in en terprise level projects I ve read articles saying Java has J2EE and frameworks like struts PHP has Zend Framework Is Zend Framework or any of the other php frameworks PHP s shot at being recognized as enter prise ready 9 May 2009 www phparch com COLUMN Matthew Frankly I think PHP is already enterprise ready It s proven itself time and again everywhere from corporate intranets to large scale sites Why a language needs one or more frameworks to be enter prise ready is beyond me The only topic that springs to mind is support and certification but PHP has that through a va
112. ssary to have different PHP configurations for each Web site With IIS FastCGI you can allow each Web site to use its own version of the php ini file This section describes how to enable this configuration in IIS with FastCGI Per Site Configuration in IIS 5 1 and IIS e 6 e e 6 oe o o 6 o Imagine that you have two Web sites in IIS 6 0 website1 com and website2 com and you want each Web site to use its own version of the php ini file Assume that the php ini file for website1 com is located in the C Inetpub website1 com folder and that the php ini for website2 com is located in the C Inetpub website2 com folder The first step is to 34 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Configure and Optimize PHP on Windows create script mappings and FastCGI configuration sec tions for each Web site To do so you can again use the fcgiconfig js script which is located in the follow ing folder AWINDIR system32 inetsrv Run the following commands to create PHP script mappings for website1 com and website2 com Make sure that you substitute the correct site address and site ID for websiteN com and siteN id respectively To find out the identifiers for each Web site open IIS Manager and select Web Sites node in a tree view on left hand si
113. t you may lose a potential visitor who follows an old link to a page that is no longer on your site Ideally this should be a smart 404 page that attempts to provide suggestions as to what the user might have been looking for At the very least stick a Google site search box on there pre populated with the name of the page that was not found See Listing 1 Applying the same treatment to the 403 Forbidden and other error pages is a good practice as well Valid Markup Does every page validate as XHTML or at least HTML If not your site is not likely to display consistently between browsers and will probably be a real mess when browsing from a mobile phone Basic Accessibility Does your site render consistently between IE 6 IE 7 IE 8 FireFox 3 Safari and Google Chrome Does your site display correctly on both Windows and OSX Is the site usable at different screen resolutions When you increase the default browser font size is the site still usable Is the site legible with CSS disabled Is it func tional with JavaScript disabled If you have answered no to any of the above then a percentage of your users will receive an inferior user experience style type text css zv el DAWA 7 1 goog wm goog wm h3 closest match goog wm h3 closest match a goog wm h3 other things goog wm ul 17 9 goog wm li search goog display block 10 gt i 12 lt style gt 13 scrip
114. t type text javascript 14 V CDATA 15 lt 16 var GOOG FIXURL LANG 17 var GOOG FIXURL SITE 18 20 seript gt 21 script type text javascript src http linkhelp clients google com tbproxy lh wm fixurl js script 22x COND u B Ww en http www YOURSITE com 45 May 2009 www phparch com Minimal Semantics eo oe 9 o o o 0 9 Does every page have a unique and relevant title meta description and meta keywords lt title gt Pre Launch Checklist by Eric David Benari lt title meta name description content Shortly after most new sites are launched the creators discover that Some necessary elements have been forgotten this can easily be avoided by following the steps in this pre launch checklist meta name keywords content RAM disk minify gzip semantics accessibility favicon AllowOverride caching Without this your search engine rank will suffer Relevant titles also improve the user experience when someone bookmarks your site or looks at the browsers history Client Side Caching Have you explicitly defined expires headers and dis abled FileETag where appropriate This can drastically reduce the number of requests on your web server
115. that array into the sqlsrv query function as shown in Listing 3 Calling Stored Procedures with Parameters In the previous example the SQL Server Driver for PHP inferred a lot of information about the parameter used in the query The driver determined that the PHP type was an integer and assumed that the SQL Server data type was an integer as well The driver also assumed that the parameter was an input parameter For simple queries these assumptions will work well Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP FEATURE but for complex queries you may need to specify the PHP or SQL Server data types and or the parameter direction For example you may want to call a stored procedure that uses output parameters to return infor mation The SQL Server Driver for PHP lets you specify this additional information by passing an array of arrays to the sqlsrv query function The entries in the outer array represent individual parameters The entries in the inner arrays represent the value the direction the PHP data type and the SQL Server data type respec tively You can omit individual entries and SQL Server will infer the missing piece s of information for the parameter s The recommended approach for handling user input as part of the query is fo use a parameterized query For example Listing 4 creates a simple stored proce dure that adds two integers and returns the sum via an output parameter The code then dem
116. the contents of the Comments field as a PHP stream and then use the PHP fpassthru function to process the contents of the stream as shown in Listing 2 While this example displays the contents of a text based field the SQL Server Driver for PHP also supports retrieving binary fields as streams If your applica tion s images are stored in the database relying on this functionality of the driver can greatly simplify your PHP code Working with Parameterized Queries Although the SQL Server Driver for PHP allows you to execute any Transact SQL string Microsoft does not recommend concatenating user input with query strings Following this approach can lead to SQL injec tion potentially allowing the user to change the query in ways that the developer may not have expected and possibly leading to security problems within the ap plication The recommended approach for handling user input as part of the query is to use a parameterized query For example the previous query searched for product reviews where the product reviewed had a product ID of 937 Imagine that the code is part of a function called DisplayReviews where the desired product ID is speci fied at run time Executing parameterized queries using the SQL Server Driver for PHP is simple In the code that follows we replace the original value of 937 in the query with the parameter marker character Then we construct an array that contains the parameter values and pass
117. the file will bloat your web server error logs with 404 robots txt not found messages from all the search crawlers trying to read the non existent file Favicon Does your site have a favicon file The icon itself is of questionable value consider ing that it is rarely even noticed but if you omit the favicon then each visitor to your site will add an ad ditional 404 favicon ico not found error message to your log files This is similar to the previous robots txt issue but considerably more severe only bots and search crawlers request the robots txt but the browser of every visitor coming to your site requests the 1 php 2 SUIS Br news gt hourly 4 contact monthly Ja 6 echo lt xml version 1 0 encoding UTF 8 gt PHP EOL ie urlset xmlns http ww sitemaps org schemas sitemap 0 9 gt PHP EOL 8 9 foreach urls as loc gt changefreq 10 echo t lt url gt PHP EOL Jun t t lt loc gt http www YOURSITE com loc lt loc gt PHP_EOL 12 t t lt changefreq gt changefreq lt changefreq gt PHP_EOL i35 t url PHP EOL 16 echo lt urlset gt 1 lt xml version 1 0 encoding UTF 8 gt 2 urlset xmlns http www sitemaps org schemas sitemap 0 9 gt So rl 4 lt loc gt http www YOURSITE com lt loc gt 33 changefreq daily changefreq 6 furl 7 r1 8 lt lo
118. tions If you like to work with the latest version of PHP 5 3 we suggest you in stall a CVS client as well for example TortoiseCVS available from http www tortoisecvs org Really the best PHP for Windows improvements are in PHP 5 3 or newer Once you are done with the installation of these packages you should see something like the window in Figure 3 Finally we need a few more tools which are used FIGURE 4 jE Computer L Local Disk C k PerfLags k php sdk L bin k phparch53 k k woo k vc 64 k deps bin k include k script k Prograrn Files FIGURE 5 W TortoiseCVS Checkout Module Module Revision Options CVSROOT pserver cysread cvs php net repository Protocol Password server pserver Protocol parameters Server cvs php net Port Repository folder Use Bug v Fetch list Module 5 OK 16 May 2009 www phparch com Send Feedback ca 9 2 FEATURE Installing PHP on Windows by the PHP build scripts re2c bison zip etc as well as a couple useful commands to set up a development directory structure It is the basics of what we called the PHP SDK You can find it here http pec12 php net downloads php windows builds php libs binary tools zip Uncompress it in the location where you would like to have the PHP SDK We chose C Mphp sdk for this a
119. to different domains simultaneously If all your content is served from a single domain then the browser backs up into a queue as it requests two files at a time Spreading your files over many domains and you can use sub domains 47 May 2009 www phparch com like images yourdomain com resolves the issue but at the cost of a slight delay as each domain needs to be resolved before any requests can be sent to it In most situations four sources of data is the ideal balance between simultaneous request limitations and domain resolution latency e 6 9 9 Are you serving every static element of your site from your server s RAM The most effective way to maximize your server s traffic handling capabilities is to avoid disk IO as much as possible Serve all your static files from a RAM disk Since RAM data will be erased if the server reboots or the OS crashes you will need to create a shell batch script that automatically restores the files from the hard disk upon reboot The following Windows DOS commands will restore files to the RAM disk R from a HDD based location on the C drive mkdir R Nyour site xcopy C your_ site R your site E H Now simply put the above code into a text file with a bat extension and the
120. uction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM need a couple of tools If you don t already have Visual Studio 2008 you can download Visual Studio Web Developer Express from Microsoft com http www microsoft com express vwd You will also need the Silverlight tools for Visual Studio which you can down load from here http silverlight net GetStarted In Visual Studio 2008 WYSIWYG support is devel oper focused which is to say that Drag n Drop works in code and the design view serves as a read only visual preview Though I find this fine for working from the developer s perspective richer WYSIWYG support is planned for a future version of Visual Studio If you re a designer you may want to check out Microsoft s Expression Blend and the other Expression tools Expression Studio which contains the all the Expression products currently retails for 699 Expression Blend is the product in the suite that a de signer would use for creating XAML based user inter faces that can then be used by developers using Visual Studio as they share a common project file format Note that Expression Studio in addition to Blend includes a graphical design tool Expression Design a web development tool Expression Web which includes PHP syntax support Expression Media for working with Video Audio and Expression Encoder for encoding media assets Once the tools are installed you are ready to build your first Silverlight application Though S
121. uild highly polished solutions Rich Networking Support Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support It includes out of the box support for calling REST style SOAP POX RSS and standard HTTP services It sup ports cross domain network access enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web There is also built in socket networking support Rich Base Class Library Silverlight 2 includes a rich NET base class library of functionality collections IO generics threading global ization XML local storage etc It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM JavaScript in tegration with NET code It also includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support enabling easy transformation and querying of data as well as local data caching and storage support The NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible sub set of the full NET Framework This partial feature set is compelling but how about a bit of context for what some of these features might mean The advanced language constructs mean not having to make JavaScript jump through hoops when implementing REAL business logic Because our server side code and our client side code can both be written in C or Visual Basic and that code will run at com piled code speeds means we no longer need to avoid heavy computational logic running client side We can even envision things like a rules engine or other business logic in a single source co
122. wo Introduction To Silverlight FEATURE e Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio Web Developer Express from Microsoft com e Silverlight tools for Visual Studio which available here icrosoft with Silverlight and Adobe with Flash M each have diametrically opposed problems when it comes to the adopting audiences Micro soft really gets the Developer but is relatively new at embracing the Designer community and mindset Adobe really gets the Designer but is still learning to embrace the Developer community and mindset Im not an artistic guy In fact I m what is commonly known as Artistically Challenged so for me comparative dis cussions like the relative merits of frame based anima tions versus timeline based animations are completely meaningless Sure Silverlight combined with the Expression Studio Tools and a person with visual talents can cre ate great animations and other visual effects using the vector graphics system and sure Silverlight has a great Media Audio Video story but you have to think a little harder to really understand the doors that Silverlight is going to open Silverlight 2 is NET This means a couple of important things First it means NET languages From Microsoft it means first class language support in the form of C and Visual Basic and dynamic languages like managed JavaScript IronPython and IronRuby as well as the syntax variet ies that
123. www phparch com MAY 2009 Microsoft Windows Looking Better than Ever ENTERPRISE E k A v Ws E m JF gt s The Rise of Frameworks g INSIDE Earl adteams security The Cost of Security p exit 0 Thinking in Circles CORNER Collecting Garbage Part 2 Cleaning Up ES OVER 25 TALKS IN EVERY CITY LIMIT 300 ATTENDEES PER CITY PRICE GOES UP JULY IST d Part 2 Cleaning Up WRITE FOR US JAN CONTENTS MAY 2008 php architect FEATURES COLUMNS EP 4 Editorial Elizabeth Tucker Long 35 UserGroup Directory Stay Connected Get Conntected 6 Pear Corner Helgi Pormar Porbj rnsson 49 Security Roundup Arne Blankerts Quality Assurance Teams The Cost of Security 8 Enterprise PHP Ivo Jansch 50 exit 0 Marco Tabini The Rise of Frameworks Thinking in Circles 11 Garbage Collection Derick Rethans 91 ElePHPants If you want to bring a PHP related topic to the attention of the professional PHP community whether it is personal research company software or anything else why not write an article for phplarchitect If you would like to contribute contact us and one of our editors will be happy to help you hone your idea and turn it into a beautiful article for our magazine Visit or contact our editorial team at and get started EDITORIAL Stay Connected by Elizabeth Tucker Long reetings to everyone getting together at one of the many confere
124. x mapubzn ext 382 Seri leoi LEM l wpe x wen FOR NE RET N NUN TENTE Driver pertes Bran Ml airi Pree bike i all debian Refresh Cancel FIGURE 11 page Of iprIormation F HCTION phpimrfo lomy flag PHP INFO ALL Chast ctrashmeifycu ani GraElmeidfycaucmnb ParamertersizEMD HUM AW Ard at Teg Eah php start oh huffser MULL 4078 T3EELZ Q php prank infGiPDleg TSHHLS php op burrez 1 TELS 20 May 2009 www phparch com FEATURE Installing PHP on Windows It is always available when you enter a debugging session It shows you the call tree of your application before it crashed You can find it at the bottom right of the Visual c Express window see Figure 12 It can be copied as text select all lines and press ctrl c very handy to quickly paste it into a bug report Well congratulations you now know how to build PHP on Windows and some of the basics of debugging What used to be the tribal knowledge of one now has one more person able to build it namely You Going Further and Support e 6 e e e 0 o o o 0 6 If you have questions or would like to help us improve P
125. xe Ssite siteN id Configuring IIS 7 0 for Multiple Versions e e o o 9 9 To configure IIS 7 0 for multiple versions of PHP use the IIS 7 0 appcmd exe command line tool to create FastCGI process pool definitions that use different versions of PHP executable Use the following syntax substituting the folder location where you installed the PHP binaries making one entry for each of your three sites pointing to the version of PHP that it should be using C gt windir system32 inetsrv appemd set config section system webServer fastCGI fullPath c php448 php exe Next define handler mappings for each of those sites to reference a corresponding FastCGI application process pool Note that each FastCGI process pool is uniquely identified by a combination of fullPath and arguments properties Use the syntax in Listing 2 sub stituting the appropriate site name for your three Web sites Enabling Per site PHP Configuration e 6 e 6 6 6 9 0 06 9 9 o o 0 o 9 When a single Web server is used to host multiple PHP Web sites it might be nece
126. you ten precious seconds to do it as described earlier increase the time if necessary and open the Attach to Process dialog be fore Debug TS php exe r sleep 10 phpinfo You will end up directly in the debugger at the location of the breakpoint The same can be done using dynamic breakpoints by clicking on the gray margin on the right side of the source editor A red dot signals the location of the breakpoint Click it again to remove it One of the things we always ask for when you file a bug on bugs php net is the backtrace or call stack proto void phpinfo int what Output a page of useful information about PHP and the current request PHP FUNCTION phpinfo long flag PHP INFO ALL CO W Our bug begins here 9 char crashmeifyoucan 11 printf s n crashmeifyoucan 12 and ends here 14 if zend parse parameters ZEND NUM ARGS TSRMLS CC le 1 amp flag FAILURE 16 return DI FIGURE 10 tach ba Process Trans WINT WIHT Trina port Infarenahan Select desc ad puces bh debug Atach to Habes code ible Pacers Price m tanhast exe 452 wen dim exe 1014 Explorer re 411 x piene ep here 2411 winTupaeire weeploeg ua 2114 sers i paka ss st x 1552 srzpl rr rxr wera Popolare Indes of i php werdiowichuldiyph

php architect: May 2009

Contents

Download Pdf Manuals

Related Search

Related Contents